How reading the environment can shift perspective
As I was driving with my friend in the quaint town of King City, beautiful well-built homes lined the streets. The suburban neighbourhood had houses with enormous backyards and were located on grand plots of land. As the steady stream of houses continued for what seemed like forever, something caught my eye. There was a vacant piece of land filled with nothing but grass and a fence made of conifers. The plot of land looked so small and out of place among the long and endless rows of houses. What stood out to me most was not the fact that the small piece of land was untouched, but how I saw the space it occupied. Almost instinctively, I kept thinking about reasons for why this land may not be desirable to build on. It was surrounded by grandiose houses from all sides, yet I couldn’t help but wonder why no one occupied it.
Looking back at that moment, I realize that whether it was conscious or unconscious, the piece of land I looked at in the lovely King City suburb was entirely a product of my own reading of the environment. We constantly read the environment that surrounds us, but we often remain unaware of how we read and the factors that may influence those thoughts. Undoubtedly, the way I read that plot of land was shaped by the promise of something more. How did we come to read land in a way that prioritizes potential over than self-worth? That piece of land in King City looked so out of place and foreign to me, as if it didn’t belong. Yet in retrospect, the story I read on that day could not be further from the story of the land itself. The way we orient ourselves towards the environment shapes how we read it.
The different meanings our surroundings can produce demonstrates a type of environmental thinking which urges awareness. In the case of my suburban moment of enlightenment, the environment which I read was not made up of what I saw, but rather it was a reading of what was not there. Through the absence of something built, the emptiness of the piece of land created meaning for me solely through it’s relation to the row of suburban houses positioned alongside the lot. How is it that an untouched area of land came to be read as an absence of something built? That is my primary concern with the way the environment has come to be thought of. We begin to read the urban environment not as something substantial on its own, but only as an absence of development.
When I look at empty plots of land in growing urban areas, it has become almost natural to me to assume that condominiums or a strip mall will be built there. At least this has been the case where I have grown up; I treasure the rare, publically accessible green spaces that are available here in Guelph.
Even on campus, spaces like the Arboretum and Johnston Green provide a green space for students to become comfortable with their surroundings. The picturesque Johnston Hall serves as one of the most iconic images of the University, and rightfully so. However, I can’t help but think about how Johnston Hall came to symbolize the University of Guelph. With Johnston Green being the most central place on campus, surrounding buildings become defined by their relation to the field itself. The way we read this flat green space, whether as a shortcut to class or as a place to relax, demonstrates the power of meaning created by the positional relationships of structures centered around campus.
In his environmental book called ‘A Sand County Almanac’ Aldo Leopold, an American environmentalist, expresses the need to read the environment as a part of ourselves rather than something exterior to us. ”Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our…concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” A voice needs to be given the environment in such a way that brings forth the awareness of the spatial relationship between humans and the earth. How we position and orient ourselves towards the environment inherently shifts our understanding of the world we live in.
The reading of the environment further occurs on a larger scale. When photographs of the Earth were first taken from the moon, the image provided a new and profound sense of the world that forever changed the way we looked at ourselves. For the first time, the finitude of the Earth was visible to the eye. This crucial moment in history is an example of how shifts occur in the reading of our environment. The Earth was seen not as something unimaginable; but rather seeing the shape of our world contained in a single photograph gave us a perspective of our significance in the world.
A strong sense of community emerges through the realization that the life we inhabit on earth is limited, shared, and surrounded by endless space. In turn, the way we read our environment and how we interact within it is forever changed through a shift in how we position ourselves with our environment. The following is a famous quote by Carl Sagan, describing a photograph of the earth that can barely be seen from millions of light-years away:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”