defining our sense of "place"

As the Baseline Group has been branching out and expanding our knowledge of Boulder's land and communities, I recall some thoughts that Gary Snyder presents in his essay,

"The Place, The Region, and The Commons" from his book The Practice of the Wild:

"One's sense of the scale of a place expands as one learns the region. The young hear further stories and go for explorations which are also subsistence forays- firewood gathering, fishing, to fairs or to market. The outlines of the larger region become part of their awareness. (Thoreau says in "Walking" that an area twenty miles in diameter will be enough to occupy a lifetime of close exploration on foot- you will never exhaust its details.)"

"The presence of this tree signifies a rainfall and a temperature range and will indicate what your agriculture might be, how steep the pitch of your roof, what raincoats you'd need. You don't have to know such details to get by in the modern cities of Portland or Bellingham. But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can truly feel more at home. The sum of a field's forces becomes what we call very loosely the "spirit of the place." To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in."


"There are tens of millions of people in North America who were physically born here but who are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally."