How Do Story Land and Earth Land Differ?
A couple of years ago I visited the Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, a yew growing when Pontius Pilate lived there. There is something about the deep history and memory caught up in these individuals that is inspiring.
Professor Jules Pretty OBE PFHEA FRSB FRSA
Professor of Environment & Society
School of Life Sciences University of Essex
Story Telling
Alienation from nature has contributed to environmental problems in today’s world. Until fairly recently in human history, our daily lives have been intertwined with living things. Now we are increasingly suffering from an extinction of experience. David Suzuki says, “we must find a new story”, and Thomas Berry writes “we are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective”. Observation today can bring much needed respect, and if we are lucky, we will find that animals, birds and places intercept us in our wanderings, helping to bring forth distinctive and personal stories of the land.
This story and knowledge creation from local circumstances has been called ecological literacy. Some have called this traditional knowledge, but this remains problematic - many moderns suspect it implies a backward step, knowledge that is only superstition. Traditional, though, is best thought of as not a particular body of knowledge, but the process of coming to knowing. Our lives involve the continuous writing and rewriting of own stories, by adjusting behaviour and by being shaped by local natures, and so our knowledges must be undergoing continuous revisions. Ecological or land literacy is not just what we know, but how we respond, how we let the natural world shape us and our cultures.
An acquisition process like this inevitably leads to greater diversity of cultures, languages and stories about land and nature because close observation of one set of local circumstances leads to divergence from those responding to another set of conditions. This is a critical element of knowledge for sustainability - its local legitimacy, its creation and recreation, its adaptiveness, and its embeddedness in social processes. This knowledge ties people to the land, and to one another. So when landscape is lost, it is not just a habitat or feature. It is the meaning for some people’s lives. Such knowledges are often embedded in cultural and religious systems, giving them strong legitimacy. This knowledge takes time to build, though it can be rapidly lost. Writing of American geographies, author Barry Lopez says, “to come to a specific understanding... requires not only time but a kind of local expertise, an intimacy with a place few of us ever develop. There is no way round the former requirement: if you want to know you must take the time. It is not in books”.
Such expertise remains a central part of the lives of indigenous people. For 300,000 generations, hunter-gatherers with predominantly oral cultures survived natural selection despite the greater brawn and speed of other predators. Our large brains must have given us a great advantage, and our transmission of knowledge and capacity to learn new things helped us to survive. Remnants of these contexts remain amongst the six hundred or so hunter-gatherer peoples spread across the world, living today mostly in landscapes on the edges of agricultural heartlands. In these predominantly oral cultures, the values of stories and relations with the land are important.
These tell us something about what ecological literacy really is. It is not just knowing the names of things and their functional uses (or values), but placing ourselves as humans as an intimate part of an animate, information-rich, observant and talkative world. They do not see the world as inanimate, with natural resources to be exploited, gathered, shot and eaten. These things are done, but only in certain ways, and the world is respected and treated with care. Indigenous people believe that if they cause harm to nature, then they will themselves come to harm, whether it is speaking without respect of certain animals, or whether it is over-fishing a lake or hunting out a certain type of animal. This is something that the industrialised world seems to have lost, and perhaps needs to remember. We have come to believe that harm to the world is inconsequential, or at the very least if something is lost then it can be replaced. We no longer think the consequences will come back to haunt us. When we stop listening and watching with care, our literacy about the world declines, and the landscapes no longer speak to us.
For the Apache, says Keith Basso, wisdom sits in places, and landscapes are never culturally vacant. Animals, places and whole landscapes have meanings, sometimes sobering, sometimes uplifting, but always with a moral dimension. Ecological literacy is not just about knowing, it is about knowing what to do, and when to do the right thing. Places and things “acquire the stamp of human events”, or memorable times, and people wrap these into stories that can be myths, historical tales, sagas or just gossip. Every story begins and ends with the phrase, “it happened at…”, and this anchoring of narrative to places means mention of a place evokes a particular story, which in turn carries a moral standard, and implication for certain types of social relations. Some Apache dialogues comprise only of a sequence of place names. After one such interaction, an elderly woman explained, “we gave that woman a picture to work on in her mind. We didn’t speak too much to her. We didn’t hold her down”.
Basso concludes that:
There is an assumed courtesy in not speaking too much, and in not demanding that the listener sees the world as the narrator wishes.
Too many words smother the audience
o An effective story-teller seems to open up thinking, letting people travel in their minds.
Stories are never definitive.
o They vary over time and are regularly changed in detail.
Arrow stories: this particular kind of story is designed to have strong consequences.
o They are fired like arrows, and are intended to guide people over long periods of time.
o As a result, said one old woman, “the land is always stalking people”.
o “Stories make us live right”, says another man.
For the Apache, places look after people, and so themselves must be treated with respect. The names of places do not lie, but if younger generations do not know the places or the stories, then the names will no longer evoke respect and understanding.
I also have worked in Death Valley with Timbisha People, and up on the slopes above are 5000 year old Bristlecone Pines.
For more on story, see:
Basso, K. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque
Booker C. 2004. The Seven Basic Plots. Continuum, London
Lopez B. 1998. About this Life. Harvill, London
McKee R. 1999. Story. Methuen, London
Pretty J. 2007. The Earth Only Endures. Earthscan, London
Pretty J. 2011. This Luminous Coast. Full Circle Editions, Saxmundham
Pretty J. 2017. The East Country. Cornell University Press, Ithaca