Linking Sustainability, Scale and Place

This piece, as the next in the process of defining my research area, is rooted in a phrase used by Nina Leopold Bradley and Wellington Huffaker in their foreword to a book entitled Aldo Leopold and the Ecological Conscience. This collection of essays, in Michel Soulé’s words, helps us interpret Leopold’s relevance to today’s social and environmental changes. The foreword suggests that:

The authors of these essays reveal the need to regain a sustainable relationship to place, community, and the natural world—to the land that supports all life (2002: ix).

For me, this phrase at once simplifies the complex task of attempting to define and operationalize sustainability by casting it as a characteristic of the way in which we relate to place (place being a conveniently geographical concept). Over the past 20 years, a distinct approach has emerged in geographical thought which advocates relational perspectives on place, in the context of views of space, place and scale as socially constructed. Through examining how we construct places, how they are inter-related, and how we relate to them, we might be able to move towards more sustainable relationships with the places where we live.

One aspect of our relationships to place is that they operate on multiple scales. In terms of my place identity, I could describe myself as resident (or belonging) to the village I come from, or the nearest city, the region, or the UK, or Europe, or even in some contexts, the planet. And geographers have worked to illustrate how these scales are socially constructed in their character and the ways in which they are operationalized. A significant element of my relationship to place is constituted by the material resources I take from various other places – food, fuel, other material goods. In obtaining these resources, I am entering into relationships with the places where these goods have come from, and with all the places they have passed through en route to me. My relationship to place is also constituted, in a less material way, by the spaces, people (and their places) over which I exert influence – material or otherwise, and also by the places which exert influence over me – a clear example being the places which exert political power over me. It is in investigating the dynamic construction of, and relationships between, the scales at which these multiple relationships operate, that the phrase ‘politics of scale’ has been used geographers.

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There is a strong current within the social and environmental justice movements today to cast activity at a ‘local’ scale as inherently ‘good’ activity. This is particularly apparent in the alternative food networks movement – the implication being that if we make our relationships to place more predominantly local, then our overall relationships to place will be more sustainable.

As outlined above, geographers have established clearly the socially constructed nature of scale, and the suggestion in some of the alternative food networks literature is that this ‘localism’ is often unreflexive and defensive. This position is described by Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman as follows:

Our own work certainly supports the view that global industrial agriculture has succeeded through the creation of a systemic ‘placelessness’, and that place has a role in the building of alternative food systems … Yet … we are cautious about an emancipatory food agenda that relies primarily on the naming and following of a particular set of norms or imaginaries about place … an ‘unreflexive’ localism could threaten a similar romantic move to the ‘saving nature’ rhetoric of environmental social movements (2005: 360).

The suggestion here is that in the contemporary world, a retreat to an unreflexive, defensive localism as the main element of our relationships to place will not be sustainable, for reasons wrapped up in the politics of scale implicated in the unreflexive construction of that local scale. It is important to remember that in searching for routes to building more sustainable relationships to place, we cannot simply cut out our relationships to the global, any more than we can cut out our relationships to our immediate local surroundings. As Rebecca Solnit has stated succinctly

the question is about negotiating a viable relationship between the local and the global, not signing up with one and shutting out the other (2006).

So in conclusion, for now, this train of thought leads me to ask whether more reflexive localism could form a significant element of a more sustainable relationship with place?