Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

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Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford University Press, 1977. ISBN 0-19-501919-9 Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part One critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part Two focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press. Ethnomusicologists, among other social scientists (like anthropologists, sociologists, and urban geographers), have begun to point toward music’s role in defining people’s “sense of place.” [32] British ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes suggests that humans can construct an idea of “place” through music that signals their position in the world in terms of social boundaries and moral and political hierarchies. [33] Stokes argues that music does not simply serve as a reflection of existing social structures, but yields the potential to actively transform a given space. Music denoting place can “preform” a knowledge of social boundaries and hierarchies that people use to negotiate and understand the identities of themselves and others and their relation to place.

In rural areas, the promotion of low impact, traditional land uses (such as subsistence agriculture and small-scale farming) could also promote human well-being through sense of place (Phillips Reference Phillips1998) and sustainable development (Halladay & Gilmour Reference Halladay and Gilmour1995) ( Fig. 1). Cultural landscapes represent those areas where human influence (traditional use of land and resources; Urquhart & Acott Reference Urquhart and Acott2014) has been part of ecosystem dynamics over the centuries, affecting landscape appearance (Phillips Reference Phillips1998), and species adaptation and diversity (Halladay & Gilmour Reference Halladay and Gilmour1995), while maintaining ecological processes (nutrient cycling and connectivity). This is particularly important in developing countries, where the maintenance of traditional systems would help create incentives for traditional land-use practices (Halladay & Gilmour Reference Halladay and Gilmour1995). Enhancing the value of native biodiversity for sense of place experiences could help identify critical native species, such as local cultivar varieties for agricultural practices (Perreault Reference Perreault2005) or wildlife for ecotourism (Martín-López et al. Reference Martín-López, Montes and Benayas2007; Di Minin et al. Reference Di Minin, Fraser, Slotow and MacMillan2013 a), and enhance their conservation ( Fig. 1). Studying geography will help you make sense of and appreciate different cultures around the globe. Learning about land, resource availability, and how that has shaped a culture to be the way it is today helps you understand the uniqueness of a culture. How and why places are similar to other places?

A sense of place is when people feel a longing of belonging towards a place or a city they are familiar with. How can a sense of place help you identify an issue and understand why it is important? If this exercise produces a sense of place as dislocatable and intrinsically linkable to other places, then it participates in the project of deterritorialization that Ursula K. Heise describes as the first step towards an environmentally oriented cosmopolitanism, or "eco-cosmopolitanism." In her important new book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, Heise shows that deterritorialization—by which she means the detachment of cultural routines, identities, and epistemologies from their ties to place and their reconfiguration at other scales—enables better understanding of how social and ecological systems function within larger global networks. Heise argues that deterritorialization—instantiated in technologies such as Google Earth but also in the field of risk theory and the narrative techniques of certain works of literature—facilitates attentiveness to worldwide phenomena as foundational to personal experience rather than the other way around. It involves ways of seeing and ways of being that understand the local less as the guarantor of authenticity and ethical relations and more as one particular effect of systems of interconnection that shape the worldness of the world at every scale. Cognitive and affective attachments to place instead become reoriented toward a new sense of planet. Without in anyway losing sight of the differences and diverse ways of life associated with particular localities, Heise compellingly shows that eco-cosmopolitanism speaks to cultural and ecological differences precisely by understanding their connectedness, as well as their potential to evolve. Bloom, W. (1990). Personal identity, national identity and international relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. Vaster than Empires and More Slow: A Story (A Wind’s Twelve Quarters Story). Harper Perennial , 2017.

Rahman, Shazia. Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism: Pakistani Women’s Literary and Cinematic Fictions. University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Think globally, act locally" is the green slogan, but the global and the local have not received equal ecocritical attention. When ecocriticism emerged in the early 1990s and began to define what an environmentalist literary and cultural criticism might be, it was localism that took priority. Developing a deep acquaintance with one's local place seemed to be the right response to environmental crisis, while "de-territorialisation" was a large part of the problem. Urban life, increased mobility and the globalised economy had weakened people's attachment to place. Estranged from their local ecosystems, consumers were dependent on long, complex chains of food production and delivery; they were unaware of the ecological consequences of their consumption because damage, whether far away or close at hand, did not readily appear connected to their actions. Work, in a late-capitalist economy, was unlikely to engage workers with local ecological conditions, and culture was subject to the homogenising effect of global capitalism and new technologies.Bixler, R. D., M. F. Floyd, and W. E. Hammitt. (2002). Environmental socialization: Quantitative tests of the childhood play hypothesis, Environment and Behavior 34(6) pp. 795–818