Thayer posits that we need to move away from bipolar politics, which he dubs “communities of interest,” toward “communities of place.”  The idea of a “community of place” again stems from Kemmis, who suggests that effective civic participation needs a “tangible object,” as interpreted by Thayer, a “table” around which people of the community can work to find common ground.  Such an idea works most ideally in the particular rather than the abstract, another argument for our focus in life to be predominantly on the attachment to the local.

Another well-known analyst of civic engagement, Robert Putnam, in his seminal Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2001), posits a related idea when he discusses how, in recent decades, many Americans’ social participation and activism tend toward “tertiary organizations.”  These are professionalized interest groups—nationally organized nonprofits—focused on single issues.  Members’ “participation” in such groups is mainly limited to writing checks to the organization, receiving publications, and putting bumper stickers on cars.  Putnam suggests this is not real civic participation, and it certainly is not a kind of community engagement that encompasses the gestalt of our place and home.

“Communities of interest,” then, tend toward single issues and comprise like-minded individuals who draw lines in the sand to do battle with ideological “enemies,” usually in court or via governmental bodies.  Such organizations are well and good, and often necessary, but they are hardly adequate to building a strong community, let alone a good society.  The political partisanship and polarized society we lament today are fueled, if not caused, by the mindset of the “community of interest.”

The “community of place,” on the other hand, grounds itself not in ideology or specific focus—or “special interest,” as politicians like to say—but in the wholeness and integrity of our local communities and, fundamental to the bioregional idea, our natural environment.  I think the Iowa City community in which I live does well as a “community of place” quite often.  A good example is the arts community.  Sure, there’s disagreement and sometimes strife, but there’s a wholistic commitment to Iowa City as an arts community—the tangible “table” around which we share values.  People from all over the political and economic spectrum come together to organize and promote the Summer of the Arts, our community theaters, our community musical organizations, and so forth.

On the other hand, we’re not immune to the “community of interest” mentality, throughout the entire political spectrum.  I think of Iowa City’s Super WalMart controversy of a few years ago, when the city looked at rezoning some public property for the construction of a new WalMart Supercenter.  Given the stakes and methodology of the WalMart corporation and our city government, I acknowledge that perhaps there wasn’t much choice in the matter for citizens to “fight” WalMart—and those community members who supported the construction of the Super WalMart on public property—other than the legal/political wrangling that did occur.  But taking a larger view, the ultimate goal should be to make these types of battles a thing of the past.  No matter who wins out, there is always division and acrimony left over among community members.  Such fights, where the outcome nearly always is positive for one side or the other, still create wedges, bitterness, and “sides.”

Both “sides” in such fights nearly always claim that the “best interest” of the community is at stake.  But often common ground cannot be found because the competing constituencies fail even to find a modest piece of real estate—a small “table,” as Thayer or Kemmis might put it—from which to start together.  On a national political scale, this is one reason why our politics are so fractured.  Of course our common interest is the safety and security of our people, our economic prosperity, and the preservation of our freedoms—we all agree on that.  But the disagreements over definitions and methods, rooted in narrow visions, are so vast that such platitudes become meaningless.

The real debate about what is “best” for the community is in definitions, methods, and needs particular to the local and specific.  Even the most modest starting place for common ground—for approaching the problem as a “community of place”—requires some cohabitation on more specific common goals and values, and that cohabitation involves collectively defining who we are as a community in this particular place.

I don’t have any magic beans to proffer to create a “community of place” as opposed to battling “communities of interest.”  Much depends on specific situations.  The idea of a “community of place” is more of a mindset than a method in many ways.  My exhortation today is for us to think of ways, as we all work toward community improvement, to make of ourselves a cooperative human collective dedicated to mutual benefit in this, our natural, social, and cultural home.

Here, August is fullness.  Our backyard tomato plants overflow with red, juicy abundance.  The zucchini multiply out of control; neighbors and coworkers avoid looking at us when we approach with an armload to share.  The farmer’s market tables seem to be sprouting their own green largesse, there is so much harvest.  Tables and trucks full of Muscatine melons pop up on street corners.  Corn and soybean fields seem to be sinking under their own rich greenness.

Here, August is emptiness.  Stores’ garden centers display wilting leftovers, ever-shrinking piles of bags of topsoil, mulch, and composted manure.  Retail shelves are cleared of swimming pool accessories, red-white-and-blue flags, and picnic supplies.  Should we plant fall spinach in that garden spot barren of thick leafy green since early summer?

Here, August is thickness.  Summer’s humidity plops in lassitude over our Midwest, the saturated air almost dank.  We worry it will never leave.  We tire and slow as we slog through the oppressive mustiness.  The swimming pool’s water almost seems to slow, too.  Did someone put a little bit of gelatin in there?

Here, August is nascent thinness.  The raspberry bushes, while they deliver sweet red fruit, show gaps in their branches as they begin to droop toward winter’s rest.  The pepper plants’ leaves are past their shiny vibrancy.  The lawn slows its manic growth, the tiny green spikes losing their muscle tone in middle age.  In our backyard prairie patch, the fat purple of beardtongue has given way to the delicate laciness of white aster.

Here, August is crisp and sweet.  Huge watermelons are jailed in big wooden bins in the middle of the air-conditioned grocery store floor, ready to be sprung to give us a little summer sparkle as we slice the thick green hide and shove dark pink sweetness into our mouths.  Juice trickles down our chin as we spit the seeds.  Sugary corn cobs, eager to be baptized by creamy pats of butter, burst from hairy green blankets ready to be ripped off in squeaky splendor.

Here, August is quiet.  July’s firecrackers are silenced.  The frog in Ralston Creek near our house has given up its nightly song.  Grasshoppers in tall grass click and buzz only occasionally.  Last-chance vacations create empty homes throughout our neighborhoods.  In our university town, even the summer students are gone.  Downtown rests.

Here, August is stale boredom.  We’re a little tired of the guilty-pleasure books we’ve been reading.  We’ve been to Lake Macbride a hundred times already.  The summer movie blockbusters are now all long in the tooth, and the theatre’s bill of new fare is underwhelming.  Weeding the garden—again—is a dreaded chore rather than a welcome act of stewardship.

Here, August is cool-tinged.  Moments flit by, in early morning or late at night, when a chilly crispness breaks through the warm, sticky atmosphere.  Once in a while, when I let the dogs out at night, I think maybe a light jacket would have been a good idea.

Here, August is darkening.  I suddenly notice that 8:00 p.m. is more black than dusky.  Fewer bicycles crisscross the sidewalk and street in front of our house in mid-evening.  The fingers of late-evening light through the windows, which have inspired our kids’ complaints that it can’t be bedtime as long as there’s still light, slowly disappear.

Here, August is disappointment.  Endless time has turned to missed opportunity.  The exercise regime has dissipated.  The progress on writing the new book has fallen short.  The garage has not in fact, finally, this year, been cleaned.

Here, August is anticipation.  We realize there is now something to pick at Wilson’s Apple Orchard, a preview of September’s bounty.  As we travel there on Highway 1 toward Solon, we see a farmer tuning up the combine.  Now and then I notice a hint of yellow on the margins of trees.  As my kids and I ride our bikes through the Lucas Elementary playground and parking lots, we notice a few cars on the grounds, and a few teachers inside sprucing up classrooms.  These seismic hints tell us life will change drastically in a few weeks.

Here, August is special.  August is moments of revel, and moments of sloth.  August is endings.  August is transitions, as are all moments of life.  Here, August is part of where we are.  Here, August is part of who we are.

As we understand more and more the necessity and urgency of “sustainability” in a world of diminishing resources, many thinkers and writers like Bill McKibben are pointing to locally based economies as key to the practices that will lead to sustainable living. In other words, “place” becomes the locus for humanity’s future. Most of the discussion over “sustainability” focuses on the practical aspects of human life—using resources within limits, minimizing or eliminating noxious and destructive outcomes of human activity, and so forth. The health of place, therefore, remains for many a rationalistic project of living within means and avoiding practical catastrophe.

That is all well and good—and necessary. However, the human relationship with place based solely on practical necessity itself is not “sustainable.” Human life is multi-dimensional, rife with reactions, motivations, and actions other than the purely rationalistic (and, indeed, part of McKibben’s argument for re-localization in his book Deep Economy focuses on human happiness). Connection to place can fully and persistently exist—and exist with fulfillment, not just survival, at its core—only when the whole human is engaged. The affective, as well as the rational, dimensions of a sense of place must be fully realized.

The connection to “place,” especially in the current environment of “sustainability,” tends toward the structures we have created around science and commerce. In that environment, the aesthetic, the spiritual, and certainly the emotional receive short shrift. Beauty and design, soulfulness and inspiration, and love and hate regarding where we are must go hand in hand with preserving our watershed and stabilizing our climate. What I’m calling the “affective” dimensions of place are no more nor no less significant than the practicalities and economics of place—what we normally tend to categorize as “environmentalism” and “sustainability.” But they are just as essential, and in many ways a precondition for effective rational action. As bioregionalist Robert Thayer, Jr. has said in his book LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, attachment precedes action, and attachment leads to care. A committed, engaged ethic and practice of sustainability—caring for our places—cannot fully happen without embracing how we feel, express, and be inspired by our connections to place. As Wendell Berry has said, we need to “give affection some standing.”

In my Iowa Summer Writing Festival workshops, I join with a small community of writers who come to Iowa City from hither and yon—some with professional aspirations and even success, some with just a desire to fulfill their personal need to express themselves—who reach into their souls and their feelings and draw out expressions of their connections to place in (we hope) an aesthetically pleasing way. In my Senior Center classes, I do likewise with a small community of wonderful folks from right here at home. We feel and express together, we inspire each other, and sometimes there’s even something like a little enlightenment sparking amongst ourselves. Together, we seek beauty in, nurture affection for, and peer into the soul of this place we hold in common.

Bioregionalist Robert Thayer, Jr. starts his 2003 book LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice by saying that three fundamental questions define our existence: Who am I (identity)? What should I do (action)? Where am I (place)? All three are interconnected and equally necessary to what makes us human. We tend to pay most attention to the first two questions—spending much of our lives trying to discover or develop our self-identity (who am I?) and cultivating work, professional, and avocational identities and activities (what should I do?). Rarely do most Americans consider the third question – what our relationship to place is (where am I?) – which is really intimately tied to the answers to the first two questions.

Robert David Sack’s 1997 book Homo Geographicus is much more academic and theoretical than Thayer’s, but his essential ideas effectively assert how fundamental place is to our very existence. The title of the book itself indicates that humanity is defined by its “geographicalness,” its inescapable relationship to place. Sack also constructs a very interesting geographical scheme in which the universe about us comprises three “realms” or “forces”—nature, social relations, and meaning. Our human activities and our attempts to understand the universe around us occur in three different areas, or what Sack calls “perspectives”—moral, aesthetic, and scientific. What ties all these together—the understanding that we seek through the various perspectives of our human thought, and the realms of nature, social relations, and meaning that are outside of our human minds—is place, our relationship with the world around us.

I know this can all get a little abstract, especially when what we’re talking about is our relationship with the “real world” out there. But perhaps the most succinct way to think about the idea that place is fundamental to our human experience is one of my favorite statements about place, which comes from Lawrence Buell’s 2001 book Writing for an Endangered World: “There never was an is without a where.”

This blog focuses on how and why living well in place is important, as well as ways of living that connect us deeply to our homes in the world.

Thomas Dean created and writes this blog.  Contact him at tom@thomasdean.net.  You can also visit www.thomasdean.net and hubpages.com/profile/Thomas+Dean.