Overview
Using his own personal home of Tvargastein (a mountain cabin near the Norwegian city, Ustaoset) as an example, Naess demonstrates how sustained engagement with a place can make one more mindful of their consumption habits and raise ecological awareness. Though his methods border the extreme and his choice of home unique, he was able to determine how to attain the base necessities for life while living off-grid. “Water carried by hand from sources two hundred to three hundred metres away becomes more valuable” (2016, p….) he tells of his experience there. Resources are looked upon as having more value than before when one lives in such a way, “hence one experiences an increasing feeling of quality and richness.” He claims that a place can determine one’s attitudes, one’s likes and dislikes, and one’s general outlook. By engaging in scientific and observational activities in Tvargastein he was able to solidify a larger process of identification with his home. A place-person, as he would put it. He argues that this process is not only cognitive, but conative, being the element in psychological processes that tends towards activity or change and appears as desire, volition or striving.
In contrast, the urbanised, consumer driven world, puts us at the mercy of politics that systematically favours people “who concentrate mainly on getting more of what there is not enough of” (Naess, 2016, p…). The marketability of profound psychological transformation does not bode well with the intentions of mass corporations. Comfort has made us blind to our own potentialities. Instead of being taught to live in relation with our surroundings, many of us have been born into an unconsciously inherited ideology of place corrosiveness; That a place is there to serve us and our needs.
“The dependence on goods and technologies where one does not belong, the increase of structural complication of life – all these factors weaken or disrupt the steady belongingness to a place.”
Naess, 2016, p…
On the other hand, a sense of place is “strengthened through a tightening of the relationships between the self and the environment.” If this is the case then the question lies therein; How can we establish places as ‘places’ in industrialised cities, decrease detachment from these places and increase respective belongingness to a wider gestalt? Allowing inhabitants “to develop the appreciation of what there is enough of”.
Reflection
Naess’ idealistic views are admirable, but his experience of a place is untranslatable to most others that lack the land space, opportunity, freedom of thought and geographical positioning he had. He does not adequately define, in my opinion, a universally applicable way of becoming a place-person. If we were all to follow in his footsteps, what would come of our current homes? Would we just abandon them? Without the same level of exposure to free nature, how are we to cultivate the same mindset? While I believe Naess’ fundamental principle of a place, or place/person, is something to strive for, a middle ground is needed to allow people to familiarise themselves with such concepts whilst retaining their urbanised lives. Systemic change is needed in the economic and political drivers of our cities that perpetuate individualism. And basic needs have to be met globally to free people from certain daily constraints, if they are even to consider such concepts.
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