Hi All!
I have been thinking about the physical for a while now. This piece looks at environmental justice and understanding the self through interfacing with the external (physical) world.
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Last week, I moved back to London. After a year of upheaval, I have returned to the place I call “home”. In coming home, I revived memories (though not by choice). They were thrust upon me at park benches, charity shop rails and bus routes. I found myself watching my self - an onlooker to the past.
These are the crumbs of the self I have left, scattered and placed in my living. My identity has not been so cohesive - it has left its loafed-morsels along the way.
This experience is a familiar one. Some people refuse to return to school reunions for fear of the crumbs they might have to eat. For it is often not a choice but rather an act of reliving played out by the self as we watch - bystanders of our passivity and reflexivity.
Sometimes, the violence of the experience tears the bread from me.
All through our lives, we leave breadcrumbs: the street where we played as a child, the field where we drank cider with our friends, the cafe where we had our first job. Sometimes, my present self is deliberate in noting places and scattering the crumbs - I see my future self observing. Sometimes, the violence of the experience tears the bread from me.
I worry about these breadcrumbs. When the floods rise, the streets burn, and the cities crumble, these too will be washed away, burnt, displaced.
Our environment is pregnant with the past. This is what Tim Ingold says [1]. I find this metaphor poetically ambiguous. Does the past ever birth? Is this only to refer to the affiliation of the natural with ‘mother’? Does it want to link to the idea of a container? This metaphor is helpful in bringing such questions to the reader, although I resent the affiliation of femininity with the natural.
The past is a living thing needing care and maintenance; we must care for the spaces where it resides.
One important takeaway is the notion that the past is a living thing needing care and maintenance; we must care for the spaces where it resides.
Suppose we see the past as constituted by human interaction (both collective and individual) with the environment. In that case, we must acknowledge the importance of place in maintaining the past and, by extension, our individual and collective identity.
An example might be helpful here.
Picture yourself walking along the street where you grew up. You see a tree swing. You suddenly remember you and your brother playing on that swing soon, a warm summer’s day. It was late in the afternoon; the sun had settled into a gentle stupor and was laying its rays against your smiling cheeks as you laughed at your brother - he was hanging upside down on the neighbourhood tree swing. Your present self smiles in the reflection of this memory—a forgotten breadcrumb discovered in the physicality of this place.
The past is nested in place. If we accept that the past forms a significant part of our identity, then this identity is also scattered across streets, parks and shops. Your identity is placed.
If we reimagine our relationship with nature as essentially one with the past and our ‘selves’, could environmental action be easier to incentivise?
Environmental action is challenging to incentivise. It is a problem of collective action, apathy and big business. I also dislike the idea of incentivising change based on anthropocentrism - i.e. our desire to retain our sense of self. And yet, human selfishness is a strong beast. If we reimagine our relationship with nature as essentially one with the past and our ‘selves’, could environmental action be easier to incentivise?
Of course, this might lead to prioritising human-centric spaces such as cities over landscapes since these physicalities are the most ‘pregnant’ with the past. Moreover, environmental damage is not cognisant of borders. Thus, our ‘selves’ are in the hands of others. This mutuality is always the problem. But reconstituting the problem as one of the self and the collective identity might be a significant enough fear (the destruction of the self) to do so.
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[1] https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34395/chapter-abstract/291670942?redirectedFrom=fulltext
The philosophy of “Hansel and Greek”.
Bread crumbs become the penicillin from mold to heal the trail left on a table plate. Crumbs food for birds and left for the biographer. Why worry about crumbs left? the past births every day with deja vu. Not the same scenario but perhaps a different story with a different ending yet to be written.