The connection between land and community

Throughout my academic career, there are three questions that have continued to stalk me, all relating to the relationship between land and community:

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?


I have come to believe that the Earth is crying out for Christians to begin to take seriously their relationship to it and the relationship of the Earth to our Creator. The land suffers alongside human communities yet we fail to recognize and probe the deep connections among the suffering. Perhaps we should do as Wes Jackson suggests to begin the process of understanding,

“What if we employed our rivers and creeks in some ritual atonement? Their sediment load is largely the result of agricultural practices based upon arrogance, tied in turn to an economic system based upon arrogance…but perhaps we need an annual formal observance in the spring - when the rivers are particularly muddy - a kind of ecological rite of atonement, in which we would ‘gather at the river.’ Maybe we should ally ourselves by virtue of a common watershed…for a watershed can and often does cut through more than one bioregion. There would be nothing abstract about a common covenant among people of a common watershed (Jackson 1987, 155).”

In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes his work with the Western Apache in recording place names. He soon learned that stories were associated with place names. Just saying a place name then became used as a moral teaching (arrows pointed at the heart). The path to wisdom involved knowing the places, the stories, and their meaning as well as walking through that space. What if the Western Apache were removed from that place?

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?