Our sense of place, where we come from—the exact patch of land that we call home—shapes us as individuals and as a society. Terry Tempest Williams put it best when she wrote, “Each of us belongs to a particular landscape, one that informs who we are, a place that carries our history, our dreams, holds us to a moral line of behavior that transcends thought” (Williams).
Williams believes that the pathway toward conservation must include conversation. The best way to open minds instead of close them is through conversation—through story. “Story offers a wash of images and emotion that returns us to our highest and deepest selves, where we remember what it means to be human, living in place with our neighbors” (Williams). And so, I’d like to start off by sharing with you the place that I belong to, the one that has grown me and shaped me irrevocably.
I’ve grown up in the same tiny beach town on the Jersey Shore virtually my whole life. Other than a 1-year excursion where I road-tripped halfway across the country to briefly settle in Dallas, TX— the home state of my girlfriend. After convincing my dad to fly out to Texas to drive the U-Haul Truck back to NJ, I returned to where I started.
I’m surrounded by the same overpopulated and overpriced suburban streets. The same strip of Main Street with pizza places on every corner and the bagel shop where I worked my first job.
If you walk far enough down the bustling main road, your feet will eventually hit boardwalk and then sand.
On warm summer nights, the boardwalk is packed with locals and tourists alike. The children are sticky with sugar and screaming on the rides. Large families sit on splintery picnic tables digging into a shared large pie—their skin sunburned and tight, their hair still dripping from the countless plunges they reveled in at the waterpark across the street.
The lights are colorful and flashing, the rides scrape and whirr, and the whole stretch smells like funnel cakes and zeppoles with powdered sugar, then boardwalk fries with vinegar, then pizza, then inevitably, even more fried food. You can stand on the old planks of the boardwalk, still warm from the sun’s rays, and take in the beauty of NYC; all lit up in lights just across the bay.
Even through all the crowds of locals and tourists alike, all the excitement of the water slides, games, and amusements—it’s the unique fingerprint that the nature of my home has left on my heart. It’s the Waackaack Creek that runs through so many backyards leading toward the expanse of the Raritan Bay. This creek carries the namesake of the Native Americans who once populated this same land, this same place that is written into my DNA—the creek that carries the namesake of the street that I was born on: Creek Road.
In her meditation titled “Knowing Our Place,” Barbara Kingsolver writes, “It’s a privilege to live any part of one’s life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know nature is out there at all…More than half of all humans now live in cities.” I don’t quite live in the wilderness, but I do live amongst a wildness. Sometimes, on eerily quiet nights, I can hear the waves from my back deck or smell the sea-salty spray on a muggy, dark, and rainy morning. I’m one short jaunt through a bustling town center away from a sea that meets the horizon. And yet, I can’t help but notice how disconnected my friends, neighbors, family, and especially myself are from nature.
We’re so populated that there are hardly any pockets of nature left. Aside from the inescapable coastline, there is one tiny forested park in my town. Houses are divided into multiple apartments, and there are people living above the shops. Most of the strip of the shore is lined with subsidized housing, with the families packed as close together as sardines in a tin.
Terry Tempest Williams warns, “As the world becomes more crowded and corroded by consumption and capitalism, this landscape of minimalism will take on greater significance, reminding us…just how essential wild country is to our psychology” (Williams).
I’m living in a place where backyards are consumed by concrete fire pits and in-ground pools. There isn’t any room left for nature…not even for a garden. We are the Garden State—but look out across our neighborhood, and the only green you’ll see is a front yard’s sterile, well-maintained patch of grass.
There’s no farmer’s market with organic, locally, and sustainably grown produce. There’s no community garden to teach our low-income population how to alleviate their dependence on ever-inflating grocery prices and unhealthy but cheap fast-food restaurants. In that same piece, Kingsolver tells her own anecdote about the growing disconnect between people and our food system. She writes,
“…the astonished neighbor children…huddled around my husband in his tiny backyard garden, in the city where he lived years ago, clapping their hands to their mouths in pure dismay as he pulled carrots from the ground.”
So many of us don’t even know how the fruits and vegetables at the grocery store are grown. We don’t know what a zucchini plant looks like when it’s growing or how seeds are produced. We’ve all become so dependent on the instant gratification and false reliability of the corporations that clothe us, feed us, shelter us, etc., that we’ve almost completely lost our connection to nature.
Kingsolver muses, “I wonder what it will mean for us to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process.” We call our fruits and vegetables “produce,” for goodness sake! And we all sit idly by and let the commodification further sever our intrinsic link with nature and ensure our dependence on greedy capitalist endeavors.
Bell Hooks, another ecofeminist author, examines the inarguable connection between the Earth and ourselves through a Black Historical lens in her piece “Touching the Earth.” In her writing, she lays out a compelling argument for how the Great Migration negatively affected the collective Black psyche and consequently left a gaping vulnerable hole for white supremacists to fill with contempt, loathing, and false assumptions of Blackness.
She writes, “Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul [Black individuals] were able to make a connection with the Earth that was ongoing and life-affirming.” Then approximately 6 million Black people migrated from the American South in search of work in the industrialized and capitalist North between the 1910s and 1970s in what is known as The Great Migration. Hooks continues,
“Without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to meditate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression. Working in conditions where the body was regarded solely as a tool (as in slavery), a profound estrangement occurred between mind and body. The way the body was represented became more important than the body itself…Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body split made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white supremacist assumptions about black identity.”
It’s evident that a disconnect from nature can not only breed self-loathing but also leads to callous disregard for other people and the world around us. “When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully” (Hooks).
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I’ve felt displacement, obviously not even in the realm of the same effects that Hooks describes as altering the Black psyche. But, when I left my hometown, the place that I belonged to, and moved to Texas, I became so homesick. The weird part is that it wasn’t an all-encompassing missing for my family or friends, but instead for the place that I came from. I remember crying over how brown everything was—the light brown concrete tollways of Dallas bled into the pale brown sidewalks that met the dry and crispy grass. I missed the green of NJ. I missed the landscape that shaped me, and I felt like I was losing myself, too.
And then, I stumbled upon a YouTube video from Roots & Refuge Farm. It was a garden tour. A woman named Jessica Sowards was taking a camera up and down the rows of raised garden beds that she had just planted on her little homestead in Arkansas, and I was enraptured. Jess continues to be my all-time life role model in the way that she sees the world, the relationship that she seeks to build with nature, and the community that she is building with sustainability and self-sufficiency at its heart.
From that one video, I had an entire perspective shift. I began consuming homesteading content like my life depended on it, and at the time, it felt that way. I filled our patio with pots and plants and started filling our apartment with them as well. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t glamorous, and I was killing more than I was growing, but I kept reminding myself that sometimes all I’ll harvest is a lesson.
It was this new concept of self-sufficiency that led me to feel more grounded and confident within myself. And looking back now, that absolutely affected how I thought of the nature around me. All of a sudden, I was trying to live a low-waste lifestyle. I was passing up produce bags at the grocery store, and I was learning about the harmful effects of pesticides and herbicides on our planet and within our food system—it was a snowball effect. I still love heirloom gardening, and I do so in my (still-cramped and not pretty) backyard.
“These lands have been here for millions of years, and they will certainly outlast us by another million years or more. But they will not remain ecologically intact without our vigilance, without our willingness to protect what is wild” (Williams). This was a lesson that I learned through my exploration of homesteading and self-sufficiency. The “Wilderness…reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully” (Kingsolver).
When we distance ourselves from the land we live on, from the agriculture that could uphold a healthy interplay between sustaining us and sustaining the planet, we grow dependent on others. We grow dependent on companies that commodify human necessities like food, water, and land/shelter. Since when did growing food, sustenance necessary for human life, become radical?
It’s our responsibility to take responsibility for the land that we belong to. It’s in each of these places that “home work is required, a participation in public life to make certain all is not destroyed under the banner of progress, expediency, or ignorance. We can not do it alone. This is the hope of a bedrock democracy, standing our ground in the places we love, together” (Williams).
So, start that backyard garden, or that front yard one, or the one that’s made up of 2 pots of herbs on your balcony. Start to learn self-sufficiency skills, because this will only empower you and create healthy self-efficacy. Again, Hooks drives home the basic foundation of ecofeminist theory: “When we love the Earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.”
Works Cited:
Hooks, Bell. “Touching The Earth.” Orionmagazine.org.
Kingsolver, Barbara. “Knowing Our Place.” School of Visual Arts.
Williams, Terry Tempest. “Home Work.” UMass Dartmouth.