What is Placemaking‘Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea .docx

What is Placemaking?
‘Placemaking’ is both an overarching idea and a hands-on tool
for improving a neighborhood, city or region. It has the
potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this
century.
What if we built our communities around places?
Placemaking is the process through which we collectively shape
our public realm to maximize shared value. Rooted in
community-based participation, Placemaking involves the
planning, design, management and programming of public
spaces. More than just creating better urban design of public
spaces, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of activities
and connections (cultural, economic, social, ecological) that
define a place and support its ongoing evolution. Placemaking
is how people are more collectively and intentionally shaping
our world, and our future on this planet.
With the increasing awareness that our human environment is
shaping us, Placemaking is how we shape humanity’s future.
While environmentalism has challenged human impact on our
planet, it is not the planet that is threatened but humanity’s
ability to live viably here. Placemaking is building both the
settlement patterns, and the communal capacity, for people to
thrive with each other and our natural world.
It takes a place to create a community, and a community to
create a place
An effective Placemaking process capitalizes on a local
community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, ultimately
creating good public spaces that promote people’s health,
happiness, and well being. When we asked visitors to pps.org
what Placemaking means to them, responses suggested that this
process is essential–even sacred–to people who truly care about
the places in their lives.

True Placemaking begins at the smallest scale.
The PPS Placemaking process, evovled out of our work with
William “Holly” Whyte in the 1970s, and still involves looking
at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live,
work and play in a particular space, to discover their needs and
aspirations. This information is then used to create a common
vision for that place. The vision can evolve quickly into an
implementation strategy, beginning with small-scale, do-able
improvements that can immediately bring benefits to public
spaces and the people who use them.
For us, Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy. It takes
root when a community expresses needs and desires about
places in their lives, even if there is not yet a clearly defined
plan of action. The yearning to unite people around a larger
vision for a particular place is often present long before the
word “Placemaking” is ever mentioned. Once the term is
introduced, however, it enables people to realize just how
inspiring their collective vision can be, and allows them to look
with fresh eyes at the potential of parks, downtowns,
waterfronts, plazas, neighborhoods, streets, markets, campuses
and public buildings. It sparks an exciting re-examination of
everyday settings and experiences in our lives.
When you focus on place, you do everything differently
Unfortunately the way our communities are built today has
become so institutionalized that community stakeholders seldom
have a chance to voice ideas and aspirations about the places
they inhabit. Placemaking breaks through this by showing
planners, designers, and engineers how to move beyond their
habit of looking at communities through the narrow lens of
single-minded goals or rigid professional disciplines. The first
step is listening to best experts in the field—the people who
live, work and play in a place.
Experience has shown us that when developers and planners
welcome as much grassroots involvement as possible, they spare
themselves a lot of headaches. Common problems like traffic-
dominated streets, little-used parks, and isolated,

underperforming development projects can be avoided by
embracing the Placemaking perspective that views a place in its
entirety, rather than zeroing in on isolated fragments of the
whole.
Since 1975, PPS has acted as an advocate and resource center
for Placemaking, continually making the case that a
collaborative community process that pays attention to issues on
the small scale is the best approach in creating and revitalizing
public spaces. Indeed, cities fail and succeed as the place scale,
but it is still this scale that goes ignored.
Cities ultimately fail or succeed at the “place” scale
Key Principles of Placemaking
A Placemaking approach provides communities with the
springboard they need to revitalize their communities. To start,
we draw upon the 11 Principles of Placemaking, which have
grown out of our experiences working with communities in 43
countries and 50 U.S. and 3000 communties. These are
guidelines that help communities integrate diverse opinions into
a vision, then translate that vision into a plan and program of
uses, and finally see that the plan is properly implemented.
Community input is essential to the Placemaking process, but so
is an understanding of a particular place and of the ways that
great places foster successful social networks and initiatives.
Using the 11 Principles and other tools we’ve developed for
improving places (such as the Power of 10 and the Place
Diagram, below) we’ve helped citizens bring immense changes
to their communities–sometimes more than stakeholders ever
dreamed possible.
The Place Diagram is one of the tools PPS has developed to
help communities evaluate places. The inner ring represents key
attributes, the middle ring intangible qualities, and the outer
ring measurable data.
Improving public spaces and the lives of people who use them
means finding the patience to take small steps, to truly listen to

people, and to see what works best, eventually turning a group
vision into the reality of a great public place.
Placemaking is not a new idea
The concepts behind Placemaking originated in the 1960s, when
visionaries like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte (who was
the editor of Fortune Magazina that got Jacobs to write Death
and Life of Great American Cities) offered groundbreaking
ideas about designing cities that catered to people, not just to
cars and shopping centers. Their work focused on the
importance of lively neighborhoods and inviting public spaces.
Jane Jacobs advocated citizen ownership of streets through the
now-famous idea of “eyes on the street.” Holly Whyte
emphasized essential elements for creating social life in public
spaces.
Applying the wisdom of Jacobs, Whyte, and others, PPS
gradually developed a comprehensive Placemaking approach for
helping communities make better public spaces beginning in
1975. The term can be heard in many settings–not only by
citizens committed to grassroots community improvement but
by planners and developers who use it as a fashionable “brand”
that implies authenticity and quality even when their projects
don’t always live up to that promise. But using “Placemaking”
to label a process that really isn’t rooted in public participation
or result in lively, genuine communities dilutes the true value of
this powerful philosophy.
PPS first started consistent use of the term in the mid-nineties
and first published a book with a definition of the term in 1997.
It takes a broader set of skills than any one discipline can offer
to create a place
Placemaking is at the heart of PPS’s work and mission, but we
do not trademark it as our property. It belongs to anyone who is
sincere about creating great places by drawing on the collective
wisdom, energy and action of those who live, work and play
there. We do feel, however, it is our responsibility to continue
to protect and perpetuate the community-driven, bottom-up
approach that Placemaking describes. Placemaking requires adn

supports great leadership and action on all levels, often
allowing leaders to not have the answers but allow an even
bolder process to unfold.
We believe that the public’s attraction to the essential qualities
of Placemaking will ensure that the term does not lose its
original meaning or promise. Making a place is not the same as
constructing a building, designing a plaza, or developing a
commercial zone. When people enjoy a place for its special
social and physical attributes, and when they are allowed to
influence decision-making about that space, then you see
genuine Placemaking in action.
Placemaking grows into an international movement
As more communities engage in Placemaking and more
professionals call their work “Placemaking,” it is now essential
to preserve the integrity of Placemaking. A great public space
cannot be measured simply by physical attributes; it must serve
people as a vital place where function is put ahead of form. PPS
encourages everyone–citizens and professionals alike–to focus
on places and the people who use them.
Placemaking strikes a balance between the built, the social, the
ecological and even the spiritual qualities of a place.
Fortunately, we can all be inspired by the examples of many
great Placemakers who have worked to promote this vision
through the years. Through the development of a Placemaking
Leadership Council PPS is working to support a broad network
to support the further evolution of Placemaking and build its
potential impact as a movement. Through bringing together our
partnerships with UN Habitat and the Ax:son Johnson create the
Future Of Places conference series to support the prominence
and impact of Placemaking internationally, with a focus on
developing cities.
Placemaking belongs to everyone: its message and mission is
bigger than any one person or organization. PPS remains
dedicated to supporting the Placemaking movement as a
“backbone organization”, growing the network and offering our
resources and experiences to all the other Placemakers out

there.
What Placemaking Is–and what it isn’t
Placemaking IS:
· Community-driven
· Visionary
· Function before form
· Adaptable
· Inclusive
· Focused on creating destinations
· Flexible
· Culturally aware
· Ever changing
· Multi-disciplinary
· Transformative
· Context-sensitive
· Inspiring
· Collaborative
· Sociable
Placemaking ISN’T:
· Imposed from above
· Reactive
· Design-driven
· A blanket solution
· Exclusionary
· Monolithic development
· Overly accommodating of the car
· One-size-fits-all
· Static
· Discipline-driven
· Privatized
· One-dimensional
· Dependent on regulatory controls
· A cost/benefit analysis
· Project-focused
· A quick fix

Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places
Effective public spaces are extremely difficult to accomplish,
because their complexity is rarely understood. As William
(Holly) Whyte said, “It’s hard to design a space that will not
attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been
accomplished.”
PPS has identified 11 key elements in transforming public
spaces into vibrant community places, whether they’re parks,
plazas, public squares, streets, sidewalks or the myriad other
outdoor and indoor spaces that have public uses in common.
These elements are:
· The Community Is The Expert
· The important starting point in developing a concept for any
public space is to identify the talents and assets within the
community. In any community there are people who can provide
an historical perspective, valuable insights into how the area
functions, and an understanding of the critical issues and what
is meaningful to people. Tapping this information at the
beginning of the process will help to create a sense of
community ownership in the project that can be of great benefit
to both the project sponsor and the community.
· Create a Place, Not a Design If your goal is to create a place
(which we think it should be), a design will not be enough. To
make an under-performing space into a vital “place,” physical
elements must be introduced that would make people welcome
and comfortable, such as seating and new landscaping, and also
through “management” changes in the pedestrian circulation
pattern and by developing more effective relationships between
the surrounding retail and the activities going on in the public
spaces. The goal is to create a place that has both a strong sense
of community and a comfortable image, as well as a setting and
activities and uses that collectively add up to something more
than the sum of its often simple parts. This is easy to say, but
difficult to accomplish.
· Look for Partners Partners are critical to the future success

and image of a public space improvement project. Whether you
want partners at the beginning to plan for the project or you
want to brainstorm and develop scenarios with a dozen partners
who might participate in the future, they are invaluable in
providing support and getting a project off the ground. They can
be local institutions, museums, schools and others.
· You Can See a Lot Just By Observing We can all learn a
great deal from others’ successes and failures. By looking at
how people are using (or not using) public spaces and finding
out what they like and don’t like about them, it is possible to
assess what makes them work or not work. Through these
observations, it will be clear what kinds of activities are
missing and what might be incorporated. And when the spaces
are built, continuing to observe them will teach even more about
how to evolve and manage them over time.
·
·
· Have a Vision
· The vision needs to come out of each individual community.
However, essential to a vision for any public space is an idea of
what kinds of activities might be happening in the space, a view
that the space should be comfortable and have a good image,
and that it should be an important place where people want to
be. It should instill a sense of pride in the people who live and
work in the surrounding area.
· Start with the Petunias: Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper The
complexity of public spaces is such that you cannot expect to do
everything right initially. The best spaces experiment with short
term improvements that can be tested and refined over many
years! Elements such as seating, outdoor cafes, public art,
striping of crosswalks and pedestrian havens, community
gardens and murals are examples of improvements that can be
accomplished in a short time.
· Triangulate “Triangulation is the process by which some
external stimulus provides a linkage between people and
prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each

other” (Holly Whyte). In a public space, the choice and
arrangement of different elements in relation to each other can
put the triangulation process in motion (or not). For example, if
a bench, a wastebasket and a telephone are placed with no
connection to each other, each may receive a very limited use,
but when they are arranged together along with other amenities
such as a coffee cart, they will naturally bring people together
(or triangulate!). On a broader level, if a children’s reading
room in a new library is located so that it is next to a children’s
playground in a park and a food kiosk is added, more activity
will occur than if these facilities were located separately.
· They Always Say “It Can’t Be Done” One of Yogi Berra’s
great sayings is “If they say it can’t be done, it doesn’t always
work out that way,” and we have found it to be appropriate for
our work as well. Creating good public spaces is inevitably
about encountering obstacles, because no one in either the
public or private sectors has the job or responsibility to “create
places.” For example, professionals such as traffic engineers,
transit operators, urban planners and architects all have narrow
definitions of their job – facilitating traffic or making trains run
on time or creating long term schemes for building cities or
designing buildings. Their job, evident in most cities, is not to
create “places.” Starting with small scale community-nurturing
improvements can demonstrate the importance of “places” and
help to overcome obstacles.
· Form Supports Function
· The input from the community and potential partners, the
understanding of how other spaces function, the
experimentation, and overcoming the obstacles and naysayers
provides the concept for the space. Although design is
important, these other elements tell you what “form” you need
to accomplish the future vision for the space.
· Money Is Not the Issue This statement can apply in a number
of ways. For example, once you’ve put in the basic
infrastructure of the public spaces, the elements that are added
that will make it work (e.g., vendors, cafes, flowers and seating)

will not be expensive. In addition, if the community and other
partners are involved in programming and other activities, this
can also reduce costs. More important is that by following these
steps, people will have so much enthusiasm for the project that
the cost is viewed much more broadly and consequently as not
significant when compared with the benefits.
· You Are Never Finished
· By nature good public spaces that respond to the needs, the
opinions and the ongoing changes of the community require
attention. Amenities wear out, needs change and other things
happen in an urban environment. Being open to the need for
change and having the management flexibility to enact that
change is what builds great public spaces and great cities and
towns.
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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n
2 / R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o P l a c e
land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the
economic determinists have tied around our collective
neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that
economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true.
An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising
perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the

land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse.
The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time,
forethought, skill and faith rather than on investments of
cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.
I have purposely presented the land ethic as
a product of social evolution because nothing so
important as an ethic is ever "written." Only the
most superficial student of history supposes that
Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the
minds of a thinking community, and, and Moses
wrote a tentative summary of it for a "seminar." I
say tentative because evolution never stops.
The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual
as well as emotional process. . . . Conservation
is paved with good intentions which prove to be
futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid
of critical understanding either of the land or of
economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as

the ethical frontier advances from the individual to
the community, its intellectual content increases.
The mechanism of operation is the same for any
ethic: social approbation for right actions: social
disapproval for wrong actions.
exc e r p T f ro m Th e re d i s c ov e ry
o f no rT h am e r i c a
By Barry Lopez
A few hours after midnight on the morning
of October twelfth in the Julian calendar of the West
— or October twenty-second, according to the modern
Gregorian calendar — Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout
aboard the caravel Pinta, spotted the coast of either San
Salvador Island or Samana Cay in the Bahamas and
shouted his exclamation into the darkness. It was the
eighteenth year of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of
Castile, and these mariners were their emissaries.

It has been my privilege to travel, to see a lot of country,
and in those travels I have learned of several ways to become
intimate with the land, ways I try to practice. I remember
a Nunamiut man at Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range
in Alaska named Justus Mekiana. I was there working on
a book and I asked him what he did when he went into a
foreign landscape. He said, “I listen.”
And a man named Levine Williams, a Koyukon
Athapaskan, who spoke sternly to a friend, after he had
made an innocent remark about how intelligent people were,
saying to him, “Every animal knows way more than you
do.”
And another man, an Inuk, watching a group of polar
bear biologists on Baffin Island comparing notes on the
migration paths of polar bears, in an effort to predict where
they might go. “Quajijaujungangitut,” he said softly, “it can’t
be learned.”
I remember a Kamba man in Kenya, Kamoya Kimeu, a

companion in the stone desert west of Lake Turkana — and
a dozen other men — telling me, you know how to see, learn
how to mark the country. And he and others teaching me to
sit down in one place for two or three hours and look.
When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are
obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to
pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person,
by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one
place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated
experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land
credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as
being more complex even than language. In these ways we
begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.
In Spanish, la querencia refers to a place on the ground
where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of
character is drawn. It comes from the verb querer, to desire,
but this verb also carries the sense of accepting a challenge,
as in a game.

In Spain, querencia is most often used to describe the
spot in a bullring where a wounded bull goes to gather
himself, the place he returns to after his painful encounters
with the picadors and the banderilleros. It is unfortunate
that the word is compromised in this way, for the idea itself
is quite beautiful — a place in which we know exactly who
we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.
Querencia conveys more than “hearth.” And it carries this
sense of being challenged — in the case of a bullfight, by
something lethal, which one may want no part of.
I would like to take this word querencia beyond its
ordinary meaning and suggest that it applies to our challenge
in the modern world, that our search for a querencia is both
S e s s i o n 2 / R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o P l a c e
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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E
a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are.

And the discovery of a querencia, I believe, hinges on the
perfection of a sense of place.
A sense of place must include, at the very least,
knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship
between people and the place they occupy, and certainly,
too, how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure
to attend to it, wounds people. Living in North America
and trying to develop a philosophy of place — a recognition
of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of geography
— inevitably brings us back to our beginnings here, to the
Spanish incursion.
The Spanish experience was to amass wealth and go
home. Those of us who have stayed, who delight in the
litanies of this landscape and who can imagine no deeper
pleasure than the fullness of our residency here, look with
horror on the survival of that imperial framework in
North America — the physical destruction of
a local landscape to increase the wealth of

people who don’t live there, or to supply
materials to buyers in distant places who
will never know the destruction that
process leaves behind. If, in a philosophy
of place, we examine our love of the land
— I do not mean romantic love, but the
love Edward Wilson calls biophilia, love
of what is alive, and the physical context
in which it lives, which we call “the hollow”
or “the canebrake” or “the woody draw” or
“the canyon” — if, in measuring our love, we
feel anger, I think we have a further obligation. It is to
develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be
done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a
relatively few people can amass wealth.
I’m aware that these words, or words like them, have
historically invoked revolution. But I ask myself, where
is the man or woman, standing before lifeless porpoises

strangled and bloated in a beach-cast driftnet, or standing on
farmland ankle deep in soil gone to flour dust, or flying over
the Cascade Mountains and seeing the clear cuts stretching
for forty miles, the sunbaked earth, the streams running with
mud, who does not want to say, “Forgive me, thou bleeding
earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers”?
If we ask ourselves what has heightened our sense of
loss in North America, what has made us feel around in the
dark for a place where we might take a stand, we would have
to answer that it is the particulars of what is now called the
environmental crisis. Acid rain. Soil erosion. Times Beach.
Falling populations of wild animals. Clearcutting. Three
Mile Island. But what we really face, I think, is something
much larger, something that goes back to Guanahani and
what Columbus decided to do, that series of acts — theft,
rape, and murder — of which the environmental crisis is
symptomatic. What we face is a crisis of culture, a crisis
of character. Five hundred years after the Nina, the Pinta,

and the Santa Maria sailed into the Bahamas, we are asking
ourselves what has been the price of the assumptions those
ships carried, particularly about the primacy of material
wealth.
One of our deepest frustrations as a culture, I think, must
be that we have made so extreme an investment in mining the
continent, created such an infrastructure of nearly endless
jobs predicated on the removal and distribution of trees,
water, minerals, fish, plants, and oil, that we cannot imagine
stopping. In the part of the country where I live, thousands
of men are now asking themselves what jobs they will have
— for they can see the handwriting on the wall — when they
are told they cannot cut down the last few trees and that
what little replanting they’ve done — if it actually works
— will not produce enough timber soon enough to ensure
their jobs.
The frustration of these men, who are my neighbors, is a
frustration I am not deeply sympathetic to — their employers

have behaved like wastrels, and they have known for years
that this was coming. But in another way I am
sympathetic, for these men are trying to live out
an American nightmare which our system of
schools and our voices of government never
told them was ill-founded. There is not
the raw material in the woods, or beyond,
to make all of us rich. And in striving
for it, we will only make ourselves, all of
us, poor.
When people have railed against
environmentalism for the restrictions it
has sought to impose, they have charged
— I’m thinking of loggers in Oregon, and
shrimp fishermen in the Gulf, and oil drillers on
the North Slope — that environmentalists are out to
destroy the independent spirit of the American entrepreneur.
They’ve meant to invoke an image of self-reliance and

personal responsibility. They’ve meant by their words to
convey this: If something is truly wrong here, we’ll see it and
fix it. We don’t need anyone to tell us what to do.
The deep and tragic confusion here is that this pose
of responsibility, this harkening to a heritage of ennobled
independence, has no historical foundation in America.
Outside of single individuals and a few small groups that
attended to the responsibilities of living on the land, attended
to the reciprocities involved, the history of the use of the
American landscape has been lawless exploitation. When
an industry asks to police itself, we must have the courage to
note that there is no precedent, that the entrenched precedent,
from the time of the Spanish, is lawlessness in the quest for
wealth, with the extension of enough local generosity to keep
from being run out of town, enough respect for institutions
to keep from being hauled before the bar, and enough
patriotism to be given the benefit of the doubt by society.
We cannot, with Huck Finn and Mark Twain, light

out for the territory any more, to a place where we might
continue to live without parental restraint. We need to find
our home. We need to find a place where we take on the
responsibilities of adults to the human community. Having
seen what is going on around us, we need to find, each
person, his or her querencia, and to believe it is not a matador
in a bullring we face, a rigged game, but an assailable beast,
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2 / R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o P l a c e
another in our history like Tamerlane or the Black Death.
What we need is to discover the continent again. We
need to see the land with a less acquisitive frame of mind.
We need to sojourn in it again, to discover the lineaments
of cooperation with it. We need to discover the difference
between the kind of independence that is a desire to be
responsible to no one but the self — the independence of
the adolescent — and the independence that means the

assumption of responsibility in society, the independence of
people who no longer need to be supervised. We need to be
more discerning about the sources of wealth. And we need
to find within ourselves, and nurture, a profound courtesy, an
unalloyed honesty.
Some hold that this task is hopeless, that the desire for
power and wealth is too strong. Without denying in any way
the dark flaws in human nature, I wish politely to disagree. I
would like to put forth what may pass for sources of hope but
which are in fact only examples that we can follow, situations
that we can take advantage of, and people who I think might
inspire us.
If we are looking for some better way to farm, we need
look no further than the Amish and Mennonite communities
of the country for that kind of intelligence.
And we should remind ourselves that it is not
necessary to be a people in order to avail
ourselves of their intelligence — that in

fact such a tack is unwise.
If we are to find examples on
which to model our courage, we need
look no further than Bartholomé de las
Casas, who wrote 450 years ago what
is relevant to us today. And if we are
afraid of human angels, we need only
remind ourselves that Las Casas was, to
some extent, also a man of his day. He paid
little attention to the plight of black slaves in the New World.
If we would search for a contemporary hero, fighting
still this beast the Spanish loosed on these shores, we
need only turn our eyes to El Salvador and the murdered
archbishop Oscar Romero.
If we require heroes closer to home, people who in their
writing, in their essays and meditations, have given us good
prescriptions for behavior, we need as a country look no
further than the work of Wendell Berry or Thomas Merton.

If we feel wisdom itself is lost, we need only enter a
library. We will find there the records of hundreds of men
and women who believed in a world larger than the one
defined in each generation by human failing. We will find
literature, which teaches us again and again how to imagine.
If we become the prisoners of our own minds, if we
think ourselves into despair, we can step onto wounded
ground with a shovel and begin to plant trees. They will
grow. They will hold the soil, provide shelter for birds, warm
someone’s home after we are gone.
If we lose faith in ourselves, we can in those moments
forget ourselves and dwell on the future of the larger
community, on the blessing of neighbors. Your neighbors are
those you can see when you look out your window, but today
these are not our only neighbors, if we mean by that word a
common burden, a common joy in an abstract terrain.
If I think back on that long night when the caravels
rolled in heavy seas off the coast of Guanahani, the waning

moon setting, the wind blowing hard beneath a clear sky, I
can easily imagine men of conscience lying there awaiting
the dawn. They could not have known — for they were the
first there — what was ahead of them, neither the wonder of
it nor how their mettle would be tested.
In a sense we lie there with them. It is our privilege
to know what the landscape is actually like — its people,
its animals. But we are like them, I think, because we
too feel ourselves on the verge of something vague but
extraordinary. Something big is in the wind, and we feel
it. And we feel, with them, the weight of Columbus’s
authority, his compelling political and ecclesiastical power.
And we sense our own reluctance, our lack of objection,
before it. His vision, however mad or immoral, is forceful.
Even if we see him as a man flawed like other men — his
megalomania and delusion, his uncommon longing for
noble titles — we are inclined to see that he got us across the
literally uncharted ocean, and that that takes a kind of genius.

It puts us, somehow, in his debt. It leaves
room to forgive him, even to believe in his
worthiness. If this search of his for gold
should produce a holocaust, we say to
ourselves, well, then, we might take
only a little, something for our children,
a poor wife waiting at home. And be
done with the man. Who can fight the
conviction that is in Columbus? Who
can deny his destiny? Life is short. Let
someone in authority take him to task.
We lie in the ships with those men, I
think, because we are ambivalent about what to
do. We do not know whether to confront this sea of troubles
or to stand away, care for our own, and take comfort in the
belief that the power to act lies elsewhere.
It is this paralysis in the face of disaster, this fear before
the beast, that would cause someone looking from the outside

to say that we face a crisis of character. It is not a crisis of
policy or of law or of administration. We cannot turn to
institutions, to environmental groups, or to government. If
we rise in the night, sleepless, to stand at the ship’s rail and
gaze at the New World under the setting moon, we know we
are thousands of miles from home, and that if we mean to
make this a true home, we have a monumental adjustment to
make, and only our companions on the ship to look to.
We must turn to each other, and sense that this is
possible.
— Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, and other works
of natural
history and fiction. He recently co-edited Home Ground:
Language for an
American Landscape, with Debra Gwartney.
ho m e p L ac e
By Scott Russel Sanders

V I I - 9
7 /Empowerment
up north. And why the trees in their very own backyards
are protected. So we offer new residents an environmental
orientation program. . . . We travel around the island by
trolley, looking at the natural systems and talking about land
restoration strategies. I take them by boat into the estuary so
they can understand our “islandness” a little better.”
Anders leans forward in her chair, intent as she describes
the foundation’s corps of more than 300 volunteers: “People
have an innate sense of protectiveness about our wildlife, our
nature—that’s nothing I’ve caused to happen.”
A desire to preserve has run high on this twelve–mile
crescent of sand and shell. J.N. “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning political cartoonist, was a powerful force in
allowing Sanibel a better fate than its sister island, Marco.
With his leadership, residents in 1945 began acquiring
pockets of land for a refuge; in 1967 they succeeded in

creating a national wildlife refuge named for Darling, which
now protects better than half the island. By the mid-1960s,
southwest Florida’s building explosion had breached the
island’s tranquility, thanks to a three-mile causeway between
Sanibel and the mainland that was constructed against the
islanders’ wishes. Mangrove forests were leveled, wildlife
habitat destroyed, and sewage dumped into the island pristine
waters. Sanibel’s residents voted to incorporate themselves
as a city in 1974 to control development and to preserve the
island’s unique balance of humans and nature. “It really
is quite extraordinary that we’ve been able to remain true
to the original Sanibel plan adopted in 1976,” says Sanibel
Planning Director Bruce Rogers. “I credit the high quality
of our elected leadership over the years—no one runs against
the plan.
“But anytime you do regulation, you have to put equal
time into education, otherwise it’s never going to work,”
says Rogers. “That’s why the work of the Sanibel-Captiva

Conservation Foundation and the refuge are so important in
carrying out our programs.”
When Anders began her work on Sanibel—first at the
wildlife refuge and, since 1988, at the foundation—she’d
completed a double major in marine science and outdoor
education at Penn State and was well-prepared to “stand on
the shoulders of the giants,” as she call Ding Darling and
Sanibel’s other conservation leaders. But she credits her
passion for nature to her early mentors—her grandmother and
father, in particular. “We lived in central Pennsylvania, in the
woods near a creek, and we were always outdoors, looking at
every flower and leaf, canoeing, hiking,” says Anders. “They
really got me to ask questions.”
How well Anders shares her knowledge and passion on
Sanibel is impossible to quantify, even with enthusiastic course
evaluations. “Ultimately, we’ll only know if we’ve succeeded
when we can answer affirmatively questions like "Can Pine
Island Sound (the estuary on the bay side of Sanibel) remain

healthy?” she says.
Meanwhile, Anders wishes she could do more. “Every
single Thursday morning, member of the realtors’ association
meet for breakfast and then caravan to view all the new
multiple listings,” she says. “I’d love to be on that bus, looking
at the landscapes with them, pointing out where mangroves
are being trimmed legally and where they’re not, and where
native plants are used in the landscape.
Just outside her office, Kristie Anders looks at an
enormous satellite photo covering a wall of the foundation’s
conference room. In the darkened room, Sanibel Island
floats emerald, enchanting, seamless. “This is how an osprey
might see it,” Anders says. “Why not do it their way and
look at the big picture, the needs of the natural as well as the
human-built community?”
She stares at her island, lost in through. “We think what
we’re doing on Sanibel is do-able anywhere,” she says. “It
doesn’t matter if your town is known as Sanibel is, for its

well-kept environment. Maybe what you’ve got is a special
cultural identity or a thriving downtown.” What’s important,
says Anders, is telling the stories behind the unique aspects of
our communities.
“All [the qualities] that set communities apart and define
their sense of place are what we’re losing to ‘the blob’ of
sprawl
and unsustainable development,” she says. “If you want to
preserve what’s special about your community, find its stories,
and then share them with everyone who lives there. In my
case, although I didn’t write the Sanibel story, I get to tell it.”
— Susan Cerulean writes from the Red Hills bioregion of north
Florida. The Book
of the Everglades, her latest anthology, was published by
Milkweed Editions in
July 2002.
pu s h fo r ch a n g e
By Ann Sihler
What is the sound of 50 push mowers clipping the grass of

a major city park? We — a group of nine ecologically-minded
friends who now call ourselves Push for Change — asked this
Zen- like question in 1994. We answered it the next spring when
we organized a “mow-in” at Portland’s famed Tom McCall
Waterfront Park. After getting a permit from the city’s Parks
Department, we invited the public to help us mow a section of
the park to demonstrate clean, quiet lawn care.
The idea for the mow-in came about after the
members of Push for Change began meeting
casually to discuss environmental issues and
the philosophy and practices of an ecologically
sound society. Before forming as a group,
each of us had decided personally that
it was important to live a more
sustainable lifestyle. Some of
us were professionally
involved in “earth-

friendly” activities such as recycling, organic gardening, or
environmental education. Others were vegetarians, frequent
bicycle commuters, or garage-sale shoppers. Although the
depth
and type of our commitment to sustainable living varied, as
a group we found ourselves much in agreement. Eventually
we saw that what we really wanted was to affect the choices
of people outside our own group — to have a wider, more
direct influence on people than simply the example of our own
behavior. We wanted to take action!
The actions we discussed ran the gamut from supporting
political campaigns to what we called “reverse vandalism” —
planting a tree in someone’s yard during the dead of night, for
example.
Somehow we kept coming back to lawn mowers. All of
us owned and enjoyed using push mowers and considered the
pollution, noise, and petroleum consumption of gas-powered
mowers unnecessary for the maintenance of many Portland

lawns. We thought that demonstrating a clean, silent, and
healthy way to care for lawns would gently remind people to
reconsider their lifestyle choices.
What we didn’t expect was the fun it would be. After
organizing two mow-ins, we have found push mower users to
be a devoted, enthusiastic lot eager to show off their scythes
and
antique mowers, their brand new models, or plain ol’ garage-
sale
specials. Attendance almost doubled from the first year to the
second, and the event expanded to include a mower maintenance
clinic. Media attention also increased — exponentially, with
National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition doing a spot on push
mowers versus gas-powered ones. Locally, we rejected
sponsorship
by Portland General Electric, which was offering rebates on
electric or push mowers for people trading in gas mowers.
If we had known how successful and fun an event such as
the mow-in would be, we would have organized one earlier!
— Ann Sihler is editor of The Association of Oregon

Recyclers' Newsletter.
fac t s a B o u t ge e s e
By Angeles Arrien from Insight and Action
Milton Olsen (the Naturalist) said it’s very
interesting that, particularly with geese, we have a lot
to learn about collectives.
Fact one: As each bird flaps its wings, it
creates an uplift for the birds following it.
By flying in a V-formation, the whole flock
adds 71 percent greater flying range than if
the bird flew alone. Many indigenous cultures recognize that
there’s a lot I can do by myself, there’s a lot I can do with a
partner, but the power of what I can get done with a collective
is quantum. It’s a mega-step, it’s a mega movement. The
lesson
from this fact: people who share a common direction and sense
of community can get where they’re going quicker and easier
because they’re traveling on the thrust of one another. That’s a

universal collective lesson.
Fact number two About Geese: Whenever a goose falls
out of formation it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of
trying to fly alone and quickly gets back into formation to take
advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in
front.
Lesson: If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in
formation with those who are headed where we want to go and
be willing to accept their help, as well as give ours to others.
Fact number three: When the lead goose gets tired, it
rotates back into the formation and another goose flies at the
point position. An invaluable lesson for us to apply to all group
work. It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing
leadership. With people as with geese, we are interdependent
on each others’ skills and capabilities and unique arrangements
of gifts, talents, resources, or what indigenous societies call the
“good, true, and beautiful.”
Fact number Four: The geese in formation honk
from behind to encourage those in front to keep up their

speed. Lesson: we need to make sure our honking from
behind is encouraging. And not something else. In
groups where there is greater encouragement against great
odds, the production is much greater — the power of
encouragement. Now, I love the word courage because it
means “to stand by one’s heart, to stand by one’s core.” To
encourage someone else’s core, to encourage someone else’s
heart — that quality of honking.
Fact number Five: When a goose gets sick, or wounded, or
shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down
to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly
again
or dies. Then they launch out on their own with another
formation or catch up with the flock. Lesson: if we have
as much sense as geese, we too will stand by each other
in difficult times as well as when we are strong. And
I think it’s important that one of the things indigenous
cultures have done for years is that they look to nature

as an outer mirror of one’s own internal nature. And
so as we begin to learn about collectives of animals and
their patterns, perhaps we have some tools, techniques,
methodologies about community and about collective
work and group work.
— “Facts About Geese” is from a talk by Angeles Arrien to the
Organization Development
Network, 1992. Arrien is a cultural anthropologist, award-
winning author, educator and
consultant to many organizations and businesses.
V I I - 1 0
S e s s i o n 7 /Empowerment N O R T H W E S T E A R T H
I N S T I T U T E
I V - 3
4 / L i v i n g i n P l a c e
exc e r p t s f ro m Bi o r e g i o na l i s m:
th e po l i t i c s o f pl ac e
From Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society

by Daniel Coleman
The trend in the environmental movement that best
captures th[e] sense of place, of commitment, and of home is
bioregionalism. Although it sounds like a term from an
advanced
program in environmental studies, bioregionalism describes
both
a movement and a fundamental orientation toward attaining
an ecological society. Quite simply, bioregionalism advocates
that human society be consciously oriented to natural life (bio-)
and that this consciousness be based on an understanding of a
particular locale or region.
The phrase “the politics of place” is often used descriptively
in lieu of bioregionalism and provides a sense of concern for
home in the broader sense. The ecological issues that seem
remote and impersonal or merely philosophical when addressed
at the national or global level become immediate and personal
when viewed at the regional or local level. For bioregionalists,
the

very concept of home must be changed from a salable
commodity
to a place where one puts down roots, a place one calls one’s
own.
No longer acceptable is the view of home as an exchangeable
piece of real estate that goes along with exchangeable jobs in
exchangeable “communities.” Bioregionalism demands the
commitment to a place required for the intimate knowing on
which care, respect, and responsibility can be based. . . .
A bioregion is itself a sort of geopolitical entity, one in which
boundaries are set not by arbitrary political factors but with a
sensitivity to natural conditions. These boundaries might
follow
the definition of a watershed, changing flora and fauna,
differing
soil types, or geological formations. Most likely it will be a
combination of these and similar factors. The identification of
a
bioregional entity will always be somewhat arbitrary,
particularly
as some bioregional criteria contradict others. North Carolina,

for example, is commonly understood to have three geographic
sections: the sandy coastal plains, the rolling hills of the
piedmont, and the wooded western mountains. The rivers
typically flow through all three. The solution, of course, is
that a
bioregionally-oriented community would apply different criteria
to different needs. Those in the coastal plains might work
together on coastal protection and issues to do with marine life.
Then, coastal communities surrounding the rivers might also
work with those upstream on water-quality issues or questions
of permissible effluent. . . .
Commitment, one of the principles of community building,
in this case a commitment to place, is the first step toward
attaining
the understanding of place advocated by bioregionalists. This
understanding of and commitment to place leads to an emphasis
on a self-reliant and sustainable way of life within the natural
context of a particular region. Since each region has unique
geological and biological features, its inhabitants will develop

a unique way of life to ensure an ecologically sustainable
community. These natural features will determine the way
basic human needs — food, clothing, shelter, and energy — are
met, which will in turn lead to a unique culture and economy.
Certainly, the thousands of distinct cultures that have existed
around the planet can at least partially be explained as having
arisen in response to the natural qualities of distinct
bioregions.
The sustainability sought by bioregionalists requires a
rootedness
that persists over generations, during which time the politics
of place can become well established. Bioregionalists believe
that well-rooted people will work to ensure the viability of
their
communities.
—Daniel Coleman is an activist and political columnist for the
Chapel
Hill Herld. He is the author of The Anarchist.
sp e a k i n g f o r do u g l a s fi r
By Gary Snyder

The bioregional movement is an educational exercise, first of
all. Next, when you really get down to brass tacks, what it
really
means is that you have people who say: I’m not going to move.
That’s where it gets new. People say I’m going to stay here,
and
you could count on me being here 20 years from now. What
that
immediately does is make a politically-empowered community
possible. Bioregionalism has this concrete base that it builds
from: human beings that live in place together for the long run.
In North America that’s a new thing!
Human beings who are planning on living together in the
same place will wish to include the non-human in their sense of
community. This also is new, to say our community does not
end
at the human boundaries, we are in a community with certain
trees, plants, birds, animals. The conversation is with the whole
thing. That’s community political life.

S e s s i o n 4 / L i v i n g i n P l a c e
I V - 4
The next step might be that you have an issue, and you testify
at a hearing. You say: I speak as a local, a local who is
committed
to being here the rest of my life, and who fully expects my
children and my grandchildren to be living here. Consequently,
my view of the issue is a long- range view, and I request that
you
have a long-range view in mind. I’m not here to talk about a 20
year logging plan. I’m here to talk about a 500 year logging
plan.
Does your logging plan address 500 years? If not, you are not
meeting your responsibility to local people.
Another person by this time takes the stand, from your
same group, and says: I’m a member of this community who
also intends to live here in the long run, and one of my friends,
Douglas Fir, can’t be here tonight. So I’m speaking for Douglas

Fir. That point of view has come to me by spending time out
in the hills, and walking with the trees, and sitting underneath
the trees, and seeing how it seems with them. Then speak a
sensitive and ecologically-sound long-range position from the
standpoint of the tree side of the community. We’ve done this
in Northern California, in particular a character who always
calls
himself “Ponderosa Pine.” You can see how it goes from there.
It’s so simple. Such common sense. And so easily grasped by
children.
— This essay appeared in The New Catalyst, January/February
1986. Gary
Snyder is an award -winning poet, essayist and environmental
activist. Danger on
Peaks is his most recent collection of poems.
cr a f t i n g nat i v e n e s s
By Jeff Bickart
I know some native Vermonters, all residents here for
quite some time, all with a deep understanding of this place,
all able to make their lives here perfectly, without excess

and without waste, from the materials and resources they
find around them, using only the tools given to them by
birth. You know them too: sugar maples, black spruces,
and Green Mountain maidenhair ferns; moose, deer, and
fisher; the common whitetail dragonfly and the eastern
tiger swallowtail; boreal chickadees, ravens, and Bicknell’s
thrushes; spring peepers and painted turtles. And a few
hundred others. There are even more I haven’t met yet. All
these native Vermonters have likely been here for tens of
thousands of generations, notwithstanding some long stays
in the south when their home ground was buried in thick ice
or still warming up after a few millennia of arctic weather. I
don’t know any Vermont people who are native like this.
I don’t expect us, of course, to live up to the same high
standards set by saw-whet owls and yellow birches. For
us, being native to a place is a much more difficult task. It
is, in fact, a becoming, a development of nativeness over
generations—but not just generations of simply being born

in a place. That may be only accident or happenstance. For
people, complete nativeness is earned: being, or becoming,
a native Vermonter must be a conscious act. And it
must be renewed, revitalized, and strengthened with every
generation.
There can be no doubt that knowledge of and personal
connection to the human history of a place is part of being
native. Growing up on the farm that has been in one’s
family for decades, a century, or more, could be nothing but
deeply meaningful. Newcomers like me will never have that
blood connection. We are not going to know, for example,
what it means to get up at 3:30 every morning, in every sort
of weather, to go out to milk in the same barn that one’s
grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather
went out to; we will not ourselves know what it means to
look out over fields once hayed with scythes by the sweat
of one’s own family, and still kept productive by ferociously
hard work. We can only hope that our children will choose

to come back and settle here after the wanderings and
explorings of young adulthood, and carry on with making a
family history.
Two miles down the road from our place, Robert Linck
has come back to Craftsbury after college in New York and a
bachelor’s degree in anthropology. His mother’s family has
been here since the 1830s. During summers in college and
after graduating, Robert worked for Pete Johnson, a local
organic vegetable grower. Now he’s moved an old trailer
onto the family land, has planted 500 black currant bushes,
and has additional plans. His sister has also moved back,
with a passion for sheep and organic dairying, after college
and a stint teaching high school in Massachusetts.
Family history and continuity are important, but are
only one part of being native. I was born in Baltimore,
Maryland, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. I’ve lived
in Maine and Vermont all but two of the past eighteen
years, since 1998 in Craftsbury. The biomes of the northern

deciduous forest and the boreal forest are where my heart
is, and where I have chosen to make my home. In a slim
volume titled The Rediscovery of North America, author Barry
Lopez writes of the Spanish word querencia, “a place on the
ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s
strength of character is drawn . . . a place in which we know
exactly who we are . . . from which we speak our deepest
beliefs.” The northern forest, and the farm country that has
been made from some of that forest, are my querencia. To
here I always come back, here I gather strength, to this land
I have pledged my life and my fidelity.
Americans have almost always been happy to move
on to the next chance, the beckoning frontier, the unsettled
country. We are mobile. And our willingness to imagine, to
head down a fresh trail, to throw everything we’ve got into
I V - 5

4 / L i v i n g i n P l a c e
something new, to take risks, has shaped us deeply. But we
have often left wreckage behind—worn-out farms, cutover
forests, cities with severe problems. Some people, however,
have always stayed behind, for whatever reasons, in difficult
places, on difficult land. Some have used these places poorly,
but also some well, with great care, with love, with slowly
growing knowledge and understanding.
We need an expanded
nativeness, a flourishing of people
committed to place in the deepest
possible ways. Indeed, I believe
that our survival depends on this:
we can no longer keep moving on.
We must decide, at last, to settle,
to become as much at home as
the black-capped chickadee and
the red squirrel; to make the best

of what is at hand. The first
standard of our success must be
the health of the land. No true
native, by his actions, leaves the
land in worse condition at the end
of his life than at the beginning,
for all lives, whether in the city or
in the country, ultimately derive
their good health from the good
health of the land. (And no
true native, loving deeply her own
home, willingly or happily makes
choices that harm the homes of
others.) We will not achieve this
in one generation, or several; it
is a project of centuries, but we
must get started.
Vermont, with relatively few

people, with small cities and much
of the population living in rural
areas, with a strong attachment
to a small-scale agriculture, with
abundant resources for self-
reliance, is a good place to begin
to craft this new nativeness. It
will be difficult, because people
everywhere have become very
nearly locked into an economic
system that (thanks to inexpensive
petroleum) supplies local needs
with stuff brought in from around
the globe. But there are numerous
examples around this state of
Vermonters figuring out how to
do things differently. Vermonters
getting local fresh vegetables

onto the tables of our citizens.
Vermonters learning how to milk
sheep and make exquisite cheeses. Vermonters turning wood
from our forests, and wool from our pastures, and wind from
our ridgelines into what we need to thrive. It is continuously
inspiring and energizing. What I see in Vermont is a drive
everywhere toward a renewed, invigorated nativeness that
respects and draws on the good knowledge, traditions, and
connectedness of the people whose family names are on the
headstones, combining that with the energies of those who
are just now establishing homes here.
My wife and I bought our place, 87 acres on the Wild
Branch River, in 1999, just a few
days after our first child was born in
Burlington. Slowly we are coming
to know it. We have planted more
than 300 fruit trees, bushes, vines and
canes, learning the nature of our soil

by digging holes for them each spring.
We ate our first own apples last year.
more of them are flowering this spring.
We expect the grapes to bear this
summer. The currants, gooseberries,
blueberries and raspberries are fruitful.
We are learning which varieties do
well here, which don’t. . . .
Our vegetable gardens are well
established and fertile, enriched by
the manure given back to us by the
neighboring dairy farmer who hays
our fields. We save our vegetable
seeds for the next season and replant
our garlic and potatoes from year to
year. The asparagus and rhubarb are
flourishing. We cut some of our own
fireweed. The rest we buy from our

neighbor, Andy Moffat. His family
has lived on this road since the 1930s.
There are now four houses, three for
family and one with renters. The
business is Christmas trees, with a side
of firewood and sometimes of syrup.
Working to unload several cords of
wood at our woodshed from Andy’s
truck, we’ve learned the unrecorded
history of our area. . . .
Food is always on people’s minds,
and in Vermont the activity aimed
at growing our own seems almost
hyperactive. The event calendars sent
out by the UVM Center for Sustainable
Agriculture and NOFA-Vermont are
stuffed: grazing seminars, dairy goat
nutrition, cheesemaking, on farm

composting, soil ecology, northern
Vermont slaughterhouse feasibility,
direct marketing of farm-raised meats,
organic vegetable seed production and
on and on.
In Westfield, Butterworks Farm,
owned by the Lazor family produces from its dairy herd
its incomparable yogurt, sold around the state, as well as
grains, dry beans, sunflower oil and other products, in a
S e s s i o n 4 / L i v i n g i n P l a c e
I V - 6
nearly closed system with almost no purchased inputs, while
building the health of the soil; they, and many other farmers
looking for new possibilities, are showing that we can supply
more of own food than we have thought we could.
To the degree that we depend on resources or finished

products brought in from outside our region, we are not
native. Can one truly be a native Vermonter (Coloradan,
Michigander, North Dakotan) if most everything one
needs—food, clothing, building materials, tools, energy and
so on—comes from somewhere
else? If being native to a place
means anything, it must include
making one’s life from the
resources of that place—and
doing so in a way that does not
degrade that place, that does
not make it possible for our
children and grandchildren
also to make native lives. But
we have moved so far from
local and regional self-reliance that this is a very difficult
business.
For the past sixteen months, as part of developing a

new course for Sterling College, where I teach, I’ve been
slowly making clothes. Garments straight from the soil
of Vermont, from this ground that I love—from pastures,
forests, roadsides, overgrown fields. I have washed, carded,
spun, knitted, woven and felted wool from Craftsbury sheep.
I’m working with local llama fiber, alpaca and mohair. I’ve
gathered milkweed, dogbane, and nettle to experiment with
the beautiful and strong fibers found in the stalks of those
plants, and have grown flax. I have tanned the hides of
deer and stillborn calves to make buckskin clothing and
leather for shoes. We could do much more here to supply
one of the most basic human needs—clothing—from local
resources. This has become very nearly a thing of the past:
our clothes are made of cotton, wool, silk, leather, nylon,
polyester, acrylic, whatever, grown/raised/extracted, and
processed, assembled we know not where or by whom, with
unaccountable environmental and social costs. Could we
change this just a little bit? Would it make some sense? . . .

What would it take? Would there be rewards that we must
now re-imagine?
A new nativeness must also take delight in and continually
expand our understanding of the wild creatures with which
we share this place. The citizenry of the woods and the
fields; the lakes, ponds and rivers; the marshes and swamps
and bogs; the alpine summits. Being able to recognize the
field marks and songs of many of Vermont’s two to three
hundred species of birds, for example, enriches every walk
and enriches life, brings more meaning and sense to what one
sees and hears every day. It brings more beauty into one’s
life, blurriness resolving into individual creatures whose
ways of living one can gradually come to know, to admire,
and to cherish.
After decades of studying birds and plants, I have
undertaken to become more acquainted with insects. In
the past few years, outstanding guides have been published

for a few groups. More than 130 kinds of dragonflies and
damselflies here? Who would have guessed! They’ve flown
back and forth past me for years and I’ve never taken a close
look. And the butterflies! How easy it is to overlook all but
the most obvious, the morning cloaks, the swallowtails, the
monarchs, the white admirals. But down there in the grasses
and the weeds are the dozen of kinds of skippers, doing
whatever it is skippers do, I don’t know, but I want to find
out. What a richness there is, how endless the pleasure of
discovery, and how satisfying to come to understand better
who else lives here.
We must craft our native hearts and native minds. Hearts
and minds that can learn how to carefully and properly shape
to our use the land and resources of Vermont, that find deep
pleasure in making here a lasting human culture that also
embraces the lives of the non-human, and that understands,
too when wildness ought to be left alone. And we must
allow ourselves in turn to be changed by this place, as all

native creatures are changed and shaped by their places, as
over generations they adapt and become embodiments of
their places. We must, literally, incorporate lush fields, fertile
river bottomlands, windy lakeshores, tumbling rocky streams
and green mountains. Otherwise, in the end, we are all just
visitors.
— This article appeared in Vermont Commons, July, 2005. Jeff
Bickart is
a faculty member at Sterling College. He lives with his family
on their farm in
Craftsbury, Vt, and grows tree fruits and small fruits
commercially.
For people, complete
nativeness is earned. . .
it must be renewed,
revitalized, and
strengthened with every
generation.
People already sense, in some way, that they live in

geographic regions comprising natural systems, of water,
air and land. Now they are becoming aware of them, and
seeing if we are overstressing these systems and rhythms.
At the scale of the bioregion, people can understand the
flow of natural systems, whereas at the global, or nation-
al, levels, the mind boggles. The systems are so varied, the
climates so different. But the bioregion is something that people
do understand.
So you have the region, and that’s the right scale; and
you have the sense of systems, that’s the right philosophy.
If you put the two of them together, you get ecological
consciousness.
— Kirkpatrick Sale, from an interview in
The New Catalyst, Spring 1987.
V - 3
5 / M a p p i n g Yo u r P l a c e

Mapping the Biosphere
By Gene Marshall from Boundaries of Home
edited by Doug Aberley
Defining your bioregion is often a task that, like peeling an
onion, reveals more and more layers before you get to the heart
of the matter. Gene Marshall, who has been active in the
bioregional
movement on local and continental levels for many years,
gives an idea of the attractive complexity of bioregional
mapping.
Let us just meditate for a moment on the chaos of geographical
“districts” we are asked to work with in contemporary society.
First of all, in the United States we have the nation as a whole,
states, counties and city limits. On top of these, we have
state legislative districts, national congressional districts,
judicial
districts, and perhaps city districts. We have postal zip-code
districts and telephone area-code districts and water control
districts, and on and on. Few, if any of us, are clear about

the boundaries of all these districts. They nevertheless chart
and shape our lives. Some of them are gerrymandered and
re-gerrymandered into ridiculous patterns. Most of them are
personally meaningless to us.
We are usually told by our parents, schools, politicians
and television sets to have patriotic feelings for our nation, but
what does that actually mean? Certainly, I relate to some of
the
geography of the United States more passionately than to any
part
of Canada or Mexico. Part of the U.S. geography is familiar to
me and has the emotional power of being my home. Yet,
Hawaii
and Alaska are farther from my “home” experience than Canada
or Mexico. Some of my dear friends are Canadian and Mexican
citizens. Some of my worst enemies are U.S. citizens. Why
must
I be willing to go to war for the U.S., fight for the U.S.
industrial
success, and shout loudly for athletic teams that hail from a
U.S.

place!? Why is my home defined by the boundaries of the
United
States?
I also live within another arbitrarily drawn set of boundaries
called “Texas.” State patriotism is emphasized here, but I don’t
actually relate to people living in Houston and El Paso more
closely than I do to the people in Oklahoma, only ten miles
from where I live. I certainly feel no less at home when I cross
the Oklahoma border. It is clear to me that our customary
geographical sensibilities and loyalties are in a fuzzy chaos of
fragmentary and shallow meanings.
Furthermore, the basic philosophy behind the determination
of this maze of geographical districts is antithetical to the
society
I am envisioning for the future. These “districts” have been set
with narrow human purposes in mind: human property rights,
human exploitation rights, human political control, human
supervision of nature and other humans — these are the motifs
that underlie our continued use of these districts.

If we shift our overall imagination from controlling
nature to cooperating with nature, other modes of drawing
our geographical districts emerge. Recognizing this has been
a central gift of the bioregional movement. Efforts have been
made in this movement to notice how the planet and all its
species of life have already arranged themselves before humans
superimposed their districts. Some of the astronauts, speaking
in favor of peace, commented that national boarders cannot
be seen from outer space. Truly that is a basic insight: the
biosphere is one interconnected whole. Suppose we begin to
look for contiguous parts of this whole: parts whose boundaries
are determined by common features of climate, vegetation,
fauna, soils, altitude and other geological features. Nature-
bonding tribes of humans arranged themselves in harmony
with these natural features. Clearly, modern civilizations have
ignored them to the point of destroying not only the outward
riches of nature itself, but also the meaningfulness of nature-
relationships for human beings.

Mapping the biosphere can be a first step, then, in strategic
practice because it concretely embodies a crucial shift in our
sensibilities from human-centered to nature-centered
evaluations
in our overall attitude toward nature — a shift from competition
to cooperation, from conflict to harmony, from separation to
partnership. It is also a meditative exercise that can be done
now by each aware person. Agreeing with other aware persons
about your proposed geographical boundaries may take years of
working together. That does not matter. My need now is for
my
own “sense of place” which depends not simply on discovering
my
own neighborhood, community or local region, but upon seeing
the relationship of my own local places to every other place on
the planet. I need a sense of my whole planet, of my
continent,
and the major sub-parts of my continent in order to see how my
local places are parts of these wider regions of natural life and
human living.

Some day our political institutions and our economic
institutions need to be brought into line with our new
geographical
sensibilities. But that is not the first step; it comes much later.
We
have to look forward to at least several decades of transition
time
during which we will have to live in two worlds: (1) the present
political world of nations and states and counties (and other
such districts) constructed to define who can exploit what part
of the planet, and (2) the coming political world of federated
life-
regions. Mapping the biosphere is a preparation for that coming
day; nevertheless, for right now, as an exercise it enables each
individual person to act upon that grand long-range vision. It is
also a deeply spiritual act that goes to the heart of our attitudes
and values. The way we conceive our geography expresses who
we are and defines how we are assuming responsibility for all
that surrounds us. This deeply personal level of mapping has
primary importance. We cannot turn our mapping task to some

professional geographer. Maps which are superimposed upon us
from “higher authorities” or “scientific theorists” mean nothing
to us personally unless data from such sources resonate with our
personally-felt sense of place.
So step one is a challenge to the individual person to
discover a fresh sense of place. This seemingly innocent shift
in
individual imagination is a radical, revolutionary step. It leads
to
a demystification of our deeply-embedded national
mythologies.
When life-regions become “my home,” the nation immediately
ceases to be “my home” and becomes instead a set of
institutions.
Speaking as a U.S. citizen, the U.S. ceases to be “my home” and
becomes a network of institutions centered in Washington, D.C.
and
fanning out to 50 state capitals and thousands of county seats.
The U.S. is also various “federal” institutions accountable
directly
to Washington D.C. and scattered across all 50 states and the

whole world. This maze of institutions is the United States. I
have to live with them and deal with them; they are part of
where
S e s s i o n 5 / M a p p i n g Yo u r P l a c e
V - 4
I live. But once I have made my interior shift in imagination,
these U.S. institutions are no longer mythologized for me as
“my
home.” Please listen to the feel of this very carefully: the
United
States is no longer my home. The United States no longer
means
to me “a people” or “a home” of any sort for anyone. The
United States, on this side of “Mapping the Biosphere,” is
simply
a maze of institutions.
So, looking with fresh eyes from this new sense of home, I
can observe the U.S. maze of institutions objectively. Are any
of them any good for anything? Can any of them be used to do

good? Are some of them capable of being phased out right
away?
Are some of them capable of being transformed into something
useful that lasts a thousand years? Are some of them useful for
the next hundred years of transition and then disposable? Once
we have mapped the biosphere, our responses to such questions
can be rendered in a simple, practical manner, unpolluted by the
national mythologies we have been trained in since infancy.
The essential simplicity of visualizing a new sense of place
can be illustrated by a ritual that I have conducted as part of a
number of speeches. I ask the audience to stand up, imagine
that they are standing, right below their feet, on their county, on
the state of Texas, on the nation of the United States. “Now
we are going to leap in the air, leaping out of this county, out
of
Texas, out of United States. When we come back down to the
ground we are going to land on this bioregion, on this continent,
on this planet. With this leap you have begun the complex
task of reinhabiting the planet; you have joined the bioregional

movement.”
This leap needs some fleshing out. What exactly is my
bioregion? How is it related to my continent? What do we
mean
by communities and neighborhoods, and which ones comprise
my bioregion? So, still focusing on a shift in the imagination of
the individual person, I want to expand upon this shift. I want
to challenge each individual leaper to do some mapping. This
challenge is summarized in the accompanying chart which you
can adopt for your own use:
The number and names of categories along the left side of
the chart can be changed. The definitions of these
geographical
scales can be altered. However, for me, this is a good chart and
a
place to begin. I will explain more carefully what each of
these
categories mean to me:
My neighborhood means the most local place in which
I live. It could be a few square miles; it could be a few square

blocks. It could contain 200 people in a rural valley or a small
creek watershed; it could contain 500-1,000 people in a very
small
urban space.
My community is larger: 5,000 to 20,000 people may live
there. Again rural places will be less populous, urban places
may
be more populous. Community, as well as neighborhood, does
not mean humans only, but rocks and water and vegetation and
all local forms of animal life. Some communities are now
vastly
overpopulated with human beings. A community in an urban
setting would likely be small enough to walk easily to every
part of
it. A more rural community might be larger, like most of a
county.
My local Bioregion is a collection of communities within
some meaningful boundaries determined by the factors of basic
land topography, watersheds, flora and fauna habitats, altitudes,
rainfalls, temperatures, and other such factors.

One of the important human factors defining a local
bioregion is the principle that it should be large enough to be
relatively self-sustaining. A community or a neighborhood may
be quite dependent on other communities and neighborhoods
for many of the necessities and cultural enrichments of life. A
local bioregion may also have imports and exports of all sorts
to and from all parts of the planet; nevertheless, a local region,
when fully transformed in the next millennium, should be able
to be relatively capable of feeding itself, caring for its own
natural
systems, clothing and housing its humans, living a full, well-
rounded life with minimal dependence on other regions.
My Sub-Biome means the next larger life-region. It is
a nesting together of perhaps 20 local bioregions. My local
bioregion is about 100 miles north to south and 120 miles east
to west, whereas my sub-biome, it seems to me, extends from
the
northern border of Red River watershed to the Gulf of Mexico
on the south, and the western and eastern borders are
determined

by the borders of that banana-shaped strip of grasslands which
extends from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
My Biome is that entire grasslands which I am calling the
Great Prairie. The term “biome” I have taken from the
excellent
mapping work done by a United Nations office (the Man
And the Biosphere Secretariat, Division of Ecological
Sciences,
UNESCO) which produced a map of all the large natural
regions
of the planet that they called biomes. This map has a degree of
acceptance across the world and is, at least, a good way for each
of us to begin our life-long task of defining what large sub-
part of
our continent we live within.
My continent is quite clear to me. I see myself living
on what some call North America, but I am using the name
“Turtle Island” in honor of this continent’s ancient residents.
In
my definition of it, this continent includes Costa Rica but not

Panama; Alaska but not Asia; Greenland but no Iceland; and
the northernmost Caribbean Islands. Clearly these decisions are
somewhat arbitrary and other persons on Turtle Island may
decide
differently about what Turtle Island includes. Nevertheless,
this is
my map, remember — my meditation on where I live.
My planet is the clearest category of all. I simply mean the
entire biosphere, its undergirding rock and metal ball, and its
surrounding atmosphere.
These geographical delineations are important to me
because they chart my circles of responsibility. It is as if I am
standing in the center of several concentric circles.
Immediately
general geographic
categories
My Neighborhood
My Community
My Local Bioregion

My sub-Biome
My Biome
My Continent
My Planet
My own exaMples
Timber Creek Watershed
Bois d’Arc Creek Watershed
Red River Flats
Southern Great Prairie
The Great Prairie
Turtle Island
Earth
V - 5
5 / M a p p i n g Yo u r P l a c e
around me is my own domestic home, the next larger circle is
my neighborhood, and so on, out to the largest circle, my
planet.

The full meaning of the word “home” is all these circles. I
stand
at one point in space which is inside all these circles. Choosing
clearly what each of these circles includes enables me to
explain
to myself where I am and how to focus the various aspects of
my
work. Take my sub-biome, for example. I am actively related
to
activities throughout this geographical scope. Though I know
people throughout the continent and the planet, I work most
frequently with people in my sub-biome. I identify with this
larger home in some important ways. I assume responsibility
for this area in ways I do not assume responsibility for any
other
“sub-biome” on the planet. While I am
convinced that I must now focus my
energies on empowering my own
neighborhood and community, I
also feel responsible for inspiring
and aiding every neighborhood

and community in my sub-biome.
I meet quarterly with people
from two or three adjacent
bioregions in my sub-biome.
When we come together, we
see ourselves as a group of
servant-leaders who return home
to various neighborhoods and
communities where we devote
ourselves to planning and
creating local empowerment.
Mapping the biosphere
charts your identity with, and
responsibility for, the whole Earth of which you are
one glorious part. It is the first step toward shifting the center
of
political gravity from the nation and its moneyed élites to more
local circles of responsibility.

— Gene Marshall recently co-authored The Reign of Reality
with his wife, Joyce
Marshall.
excerpts froM
Mapping the sacred places
By Jan DeBlieu
I once drew a map to my home on the North Carolina
Outer Banks for a friend who wanted to visit. I was new then
on Hatteras Island, new to the salt-scorched landscape and
interlocking planes of earth, sea, and sky. I felt newly
awakened
as well, as if I had spent the previous years with my eyes and
my thoughts half-lidded. Every day I set aside time to explore
unfamiliar terrain and wonder at the great schools of fish, the
falcons, and sea birds that migrated past the island with the tug
of seasonal currents.
Since there was not much to show on my map — just a
single road beelining down a skinny arm of sand — I decorated
it
with my favorite landmarks. On the north end I put three arches

covered with a mane of vertical lines; these were the grassy,
camel-
hump dunes that fronted the ocean. Halfway to my house I
drew
a tuxedoed heron with hot-pink legs; this marked the marshy
flats
where I had stumbled on a group of black-necked stilts and the
messy stacks of twigs they use as nests. Last I drew a stick-
figure
crustacean waving a flag on a nearby beach. I went to that
beach
often to watch ghost crabs skirmishing, shoving each other with
round, pearly claws as if locked in mortal combat. Next to the
figure I penciled in “Ghost Crab Acres.”
I meant the map to be comical, but also to honor places
on Hatteras where I had witnessed something important or
particularly beautiful. I am not much of an illustrator, and the
map looked like something a first-grader might have drawn.
My friend called a few days after she received it. “Are these
amusement parks or something?” she

asked. I realized sheepishly that the
connection I felt to each landmark
was too personal, too powerful
to be explained by a simple
drawing.
Now I wish I had kept
that map for myself, or
made another. I wish I had
drawn a new map with
equally foolish figures for
each of my 15 years on these
islands. Put together, they
would compose a running
chronicle of the places I have
held dear here, a mental history
of my courtship with the land.
I am more insular these
days, too caught up in the eddies of

family life to do much. While I’m still
curious about the natural forces that play across the islands, I
no
longer have the same white-hot drive to observe and learn. I
live
on a pine-sheltered ridge on Roanoke Island, out of sight of
the
ever-shifting horizons. The latest atlas of my world would
mark
hideaways in the dunes and marshes, but also the houses of
close
friends, the bookstore in nearby Manteo, and the grassy field
where I take my young son to romp.
We map, each of us, mentally and physically, every day
of our lives. We map to keep ourselves oriented, and to keep
ourselves sane. “The very word lost in our language means
much
more than simple geographical uncertainty,” the urban planner
Kevin Lynch once wrote. “It carries overtones of utter disaster
. . . .
Let the mishap of disorientation occur, and the sense of
anxiety

and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it
is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.” And we map
the places we love in much more detail than the places we
dislike.
“The sweet sense of home is strongest,” Lynch wrote, “when
home is not only familiar but distinctive as well.
It is in the imagination, I think, that the art of mapping
reaches its apex.
In 1960 Kevin Lynch published a book entitled The Image
of the City that describes a study by Lynch and several
colleagues
on the perceptions of people living in Boston, Los Angeles, and
S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n
I I I - 6
caught the first sockeye salmon, little children sprinkled their
hair with sacred white eagle down, painted their faces, and put

on white blankets. They met the canoe and carried the first
salmon in their arms as if it were an infant. An older woman
cleaned the fish with a mussel-shell knife, after which the flesh
was boiled and given to the children to eat. To the S’Klallam,
the
sockeye is a person and deserves careful treatment. Versions of
the first salmon ceremony were practiced by Native peoples
from
California to Japan.
Exc E r p t s f ro m Wh E r E cu r r E n t s
mE rg E: th E ma r I t I m E no rt h W E s t
By Steve Johnson from Knowing Home
Ten thousand years ago the last great advance of ice had
peaked and was declining. Most of Canada and much of the
United States was covered with ice and snow. But even then the
area we call the Maritime Northwest, a thin strip of land 100
miles west to east, and extending the length of British
Columbia,
Washington, Oregon and northern California, was relatively

moist, more humid than today, and green.
The glaciers extended into Washington, but in Oregon did
not reach out much beyond the higher elevations of the present
Cascade mountain range. The storm track, bringing moderate
marine air into the region, was eight degrees further south than
it
is today. The climate of western Oregon shifted accordingly
and
was more like the present day climate of the British Columbia
coastal area.
It was this narrow strip of land that allowed the migration of
tribes from the Asian continent; with its north and south
running
mountains, the greenbelt of land also allowed for the migration
of plants and animals, throwing their seed forward in advance
of
the glaciers, like a vital dossier, keeping their DNA instructions
just ahead of extinction.
The effects of the glacial activity are still visible in both
Washington and Oregon. The North Cascades remain uncovered

by earth, and this region is today the largest glaciated area in
the
continental United States. Puget Sound is the result of glacial
flooding that covered a series of river valleys. The Scablands
in
eastern Washington are the result of a flood that emptied a lake
one-half the size of Lake Michigan out over the eastern part of
Washington, down the Columbia River, and up the Willamette.
This same flood rushed out across Washington, through the
Columbia Gorge and, at the confluence with the Willamette,
was
deflected up the valley, creating a lake (400 feet deep)
extending
as far as Junction City in Lane County.
Deposits of material transported from such floods fill the
valley floors of the Maritime, creating sometimes shallow
topsoil
on top of undigested upper elevation material (gravels), or
deposits of very fine material, known in the geological trade as
“rock flour.”

the Willamette valleY
The Willamette Valley separates the Coast Range from
the Cascade Range, between the Columbia River on the north
and the Siskiyou/Klamath Mountains on the south. It is
approximately 100 miles long and 40-50 miles wide.
The drainage area of the Willamette River is 11,000 square
miles, which represents 11.7 percent of the land area of the
state,
while containing two-thirds of the state’s residents.
It seems likely that before native Indian habitation the
valley was more completely forested, filled with
alders, cottonwoods and maples along streams,
and lodgepole pine covering the rest.
By the time the early white explorers and settlers
came to the valley, the vegetation was altered.
The settlers found open prairie land. The
native Indians conducted
annual burnings of vast

stretches of the valley, and
earth records reveal that
these intentional burnings
dated back at least as far as
1647.
It is thought the burning was a form of game management.
Deer and other animals were forced to graze on the remaining
unburned areas where they could be easily hunted. Honey and
grasshoppers became easier to harvest, as well as the seed of
the
sunflower plant and the tarweed, which was referred to by the
white settlers as “wild wheat.”
Early white settlers were surprised by the burning just as
today’s newcomers to the region are surprised by late summer
air
pollution from grass field and forest slash burnings:
It is probable we did not yet know that the Indians were wont to
baptise the whole country with fire at the close of every
summer; but very soon we

were to learn our first lesson. This season the fire was started
somewhere on the south
Yamhill, and came sweeping through the Salt Creek Gap. All
our skill and perseverance
Wh E n It ra I n s It Do E s n’t po u r
I’ve reached the land of rain and mud
where flowers and trees so early bud.
It rains and rains both night and day
in Oregon, it rains always.
Oh Oregon, wet Oregon,
as through the rain and mud I run,
I look about and see it pour
and wish it wouldn’t rain anymore.
Oh, Oregon girls, wet Oregon girls,
with laughing eyes and soggy curls;
They’ll sing and dance both night and day
’Til some webfooter comes their way;
They’ll meet him at the kitchen door
Saying “wipe your feet or come no more.”

— Manuscript from the Randall U. Mills Archives,
University of Oregon
I I I - 7
3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n
were required to save our camp. As the shades of night
deepened, long lines of flame
and smoke could be seen retreating before the breeze across the
hills and valleys. (Jessie
Applegate, 1844)
The Willamette Valley is actually a broad flatland with
several distinct sections. From the beginnings of the Siskiyou/
Klamath Mountains, south of Eugene, and north of the
confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette Rivers, the valley
floor is narrow and flat, only occasionally interrupted by a few
volcanic buttes.
Further north, near the junction of the Santiam River and
the Willamette, several hills intrude on the valley floor: the
Waldo Hills on the east and Eola Hills on the west. Just north

of Salem the valley opens up, reaching its maximum width and
flattest terrain. Here the Pudding and Molalla rivers flow into
the Willamette, while from behind the Eola Hills, on the west,
the Yamhill River, for a short period an important
transportation
river, flows east also to meet the Willamette.
Past the junction of the Yamhill River, near Newberg, the
Willamette curves toward the east to skirt the southern edge of
the Chehalem Mountains, a short spur of the Coast Range
(1,000
feet elevation at Bald Peak), which separates the Yamhill River
from the Tualatin River.
Greater Portland area
Here, on the west, we pass into the Tualatin Plains, and into
the Greater Portland area through its western gate.
the tualatin Plains
The valley created by the Tualatin River is about 200
miles square. Today it is home to some 200,000 people. It is
a microcosm of the Willamette Valley surrounded on all sides

by hills and mountains. The settlement of the valley has spread
out across the lowlands; developers, taking advantage of the
“cheapest” landscape, displace farms along the way.
The Tualatin Plains are separated from the Yamhill River
by the Chehalem Mountains, which act as an additional buffer
from the moisture-laden storms passing through the Coast
Range. At the peak of the mountains the annual average
rainfall
is 54-55 inches, whereas only several miles northeast near
Aloha
on the Tualatin Plains, the annual average rainfall is 38 inches.
Compare this to downtown Portland with an annual average
rainfall of 46 inches.
oreGon citY
Past the junction of the Tualatin River, the Willamette
Valley narrows down to a few miles in width. On the west the
Chehalem and Tualatin Mountains come close to the river’s
edge, while on the east a ridge of the Cascades, which
separates

the Molalla and Clackamas river watersheds, comes close to the
shore of the river as it falls 30 feet at Oregon City.
Here both salmon and settlers have come to rest; the salmon
do not naturally make it past the falls, and the settlers stopped
here, forming Oregon’s leading city in the 1840s. But Oregon
City was not destined to continue its primary role due to its
restricted physical site and inaccessibility by river for larger
boats.
Oregon City is the southern gateway into the Greater
Portland area and, because of prevailing wind patterns, has
some
of the highest air pollution readings in the area.
clackamas river
As we move downriver from Oregon City, the Tualatin
Mountains begin to take hold of the landscape on the west
side of the river; on the east side the Clackamas River joins the
Willamette. The Clackamas passes mostly through a narrow
channel, seldom given a chance to meander in its 80-mile
journey.
The town of Estacada, 30 miles southeast of downtown

Portland along the Clackamas River, is the last outpost before
the
Cascade Mountains. The climate of Estacada is a far cry from
downtown Portland, with 100 fewer days in the growing season
and 15 inches more annual rainfall.
Above the Clackamas on the north and south are plateaus
punctuated by higher hills. On the south is an open prairie area
which in former days was referred to as Horse Heaven Ridge.
Just west of McIver Park is an excellent viewpoint of the brief
Clackamas River Valley. To the north of the Clackamas, the
westward expansion of Portland creates an incongruous mix
of berry farms, tree nurseries and post World War II housing
developments.
Both plateaus, especially Horse Heaven Ridge, are under
the influence of the Columbia Gorge winds, and both have
more rainfall and snow accumulations than the city of Portland.
S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

I I I - 8
The third place (also known as third space) is a term used in the
concept of community building to refer to social surroundings
separate from the two usual social environments of home and
the workplace. In his influential book The Great Good Place,
Ray Oldenburg (1989, 1991) argues that third places are
important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and
establishing feelings of a sense of place.
Oldenburg calls one's "first place" the home and those that one
lives with. The "second place" is the workplace — where people
may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are
"anchors" of community life and facilitate and foster broader,
more creative interaction. All societies already have informal
meeting places; what is new in modern times is the
intentionality of seeking them out as vital to current societal
needs. Oldenburg suggests the following hallmarks of a true
"third place":
· Free or inexpensive
· Food and drink, while not essential, are important
· Highly accessible: proximate for many (walking distance)
· Involve regulars – those who habitually congregate there
· Welcoming and comfortable
· Both new friends and old should be found there.
Robert Putnam addressed issues related to third place in
Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (1995,
2000).
There are eight characteristics that define a Third Place, as
described by Oldenburg.
Neutral Ground
Occupants of Third Places have little to no obligation to be
there. They are not tied down to the area financially, politically,

legally, or otherwise and are free to come and go as they please.
Leveler[
Third Places put no importance on an individual's status in a
society. Someone's economic or social status do not matter in a
Third Place, allowing for a sense of commonality among its
occupants. There are no prerequisites or requirements that
would prevent acceptance or participation in the Third Place.
Conversation is Main Activity
Playful and happy conversation is the main focus of activity in
Third Places, although it is not required to be the only activity.
The tone of conversation is usually light hearted and humorous;
wit and good natured playfulness are highly valued.
Accessibility and Accommodation
Third places must be open and readily accessible to those who
occupy them. They must also be accommodating, meaning they
provide the wants of their inhabitants, and all occupants feel
their needs have been fulfilled.
The Regulars
Third Places harbor a number of regulars that help give the
space its tone, and help set the mood and characteristics of the
area. Regulars to Third Places also attract newcomers, and are
there to help someone new to the space feel welcome and
accommodated.
A Low Profile
Third Places are characteristically wholesome. The inside of a
Third Place is without extravagance or grandiosity, and has a
homely feel. Third Places are never snobby or pretentious, and
are accepting of all types of individuals, from several different
walks of life.
The Mood is Playful
The tone of conversation in Third Places are never marked with
tension or hostility. Instead, they have a playful nature, where
witty conversation and frivolous banter are not only common,
but highly valued.
A Home Away From Home
Occupants of Third Places will often have the same feelings of

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