AKBLG Conference

Sense of Place & Its Drivers
The Lifestyle Dynamics of Mountain Towns

As you were told in the introduction, I regret to say that I am from the other side of the Limestone Curtain. For that reason accepting an invitation to speak at this conference was awkward to say the least. What could someone who lives in Alberta possibly have to say that would be of any value whatsoever in contemplating community development and sense of place in British Columbia?

As many communities in British Columbia have been maintaining for years, we Albertans are a dreadful peril in our own right. Albertans are notorious for their terrible driving. We don’t care about local customs or traditions. We are insensitive to landscape and local sense of place. We are rude, aggressive, thoughtless and worst of all — we have money.

It is unwise to put a thing such as money in the hands of such feckless people. When we show up in town, the neighbourhood invariably goes to hell. You would be wise to keep us on the other side of the divide. For my part, Mayor Doyle, you will be happy to hear that I promise to go back home as soon as I finish my speech.

For sponsoring my presentation today, I would like to thank the British Columbia Mining Association. It was interesting to note that organizers of this conference were a little concerned that I might take exception to the fact that my presentation on sense of place was being paid for by a resource industry. There is no need for concern. Much of my life has been spent in mining or rail towns.

I would submit to you, that from the point of view of community values and sense of place, being a resource-based community is not necessarily a bad thing.  Common experience and focus in such communities can create a shared identity that can be both meaningful and enduring.

People living in resource based communities can possess a strong connection not just to the resources upon which they depend for their livelihoods but to the landscapes that surround them.

I have also found that they are grateful for what they have in ways that succeeding cultures not based on resource development may not appreciate. This is an interesting phenomenon to say the least, one that strident environmentalists often fail to consider or cultivate. But I am getting ahead of myself here. 

My subject today is sense of place and its drivers. I would like to talk this morning about how we choose where we live and why we stay. I would like to talk about how individual identity is shaped by the circumstances and conditions of place.

I would also like to talk about how community values emerge from a conscious or unconscious agreement on how one should act in respecting the landscapes upon which a rural community relies upon for its identity; and how acceptable parameters are established in mountain communities to define how residents ought to respect one another as locals.

Finally I will argue that, because we have not considered sense of place as seriously as we might, we are taking a gamble with the future of the mountain West. In conclusion, I will offer some suggestions about how we can honour and protect this valuable but almost ineffable quality of identity and community so as to create a future in which the qualities of place that attracted and kept so many of us here still exist for our children and their children to enjoy.      

As was hinted in my introduction, before taking up work on the United Nations Water for Life Initiative in Canada, I spent the better part of a lifetime articulating and sharing the nature, history and culture of the mountain West. During that time, I helped organize a number of very large-scale heritage celebrations that involved the participation of communities throughout the mountain West.

These included centennial commemorations of mountaineering and other historical events, celebrations related to expanding understanding of wildlife icons such as grizzly bears and initiatives aimed at improving understanding of mountains as headwaters.

Quite unexpectedly, this work put into relief commonalities that existed within communities that locals thought were very different  from one another; that may in fact have rivals. I found that, beneath all of the tourism sloganeering, rhetoric and spin, and occasional bitter rivalry over hockey teams, the people who lived in these mountains shared the same fundamental appreciation of place.

I also discovered that this deep and often passionate sense of localness which seems to be a common feature of mountain communities in the West has only barely been articulated and only superficially harnessed in support of community development and pride.

It occurred to me that if we could isolate this quality of localness and cultivate it before it is overwhelmed by outside interests, it can be a powerful engine of community development. So, what is sense of place and what are its drivers?

The relationship between people and the places in which they live is a complicated one. It always has been. In 400 B.C. the great Greek physician Hippocrates observed that whenever people from one country were sent distantly to another, they were often beset with a debilitating lassitude.

From this, the father of modern medicine deduced that people absorbed topographic influences from the moment of birth and that separation from them could be perilous. This lassitude he called nostalgia. The word has its roots in the Greek nostos – to return and algos – to suffer. We call it homesickness.

The first modern sufferers of this “lassitude of dislocation” were seventeenth century Swiss mercenaries in the employ of European emperors.

Though the Swiss were tough and committed soldiers, they found themselves overcome by lassitude and melancholy the moment they were confronted by the slightest sight, sound or smell that reminded them of Switzerland. The mere sound of a Swiss cowbell would completely incapacitate them. There are Swiss mountain guides in Golden who are like that even today.

The Europeans called this debilitating sense of place “the terrible Swiss disease.” This disease became an epidemic over much of the world as people began to migrate to the New World in large numbers in 18th and 19th century.

Human population movement has become so rapid and common place that it is easy to forget how stationary people used to be and how connected to place we once were. But the lingering attachment we have to where we were born is not something we can easily dismiss. When Europeans first arrived on the Great Plains and in the mountains of the Canadian West, the experience was so alien and the landscape so confronting for many it was if they were landing on the moon.

This attachment to place is not something we seem to be able to shake. When NASA sent the first astronauts to the moon, they prepared them for the shock of the new by having them study how European immigrants reacted to the alien landscapes of the North American West.

Aboriginal peoples were utterly at home in the landscapes of the West, and even today they must look upon us new comers as clumsy in our efforts to come to grips what is really essential about place in the mountain West. Settlers even today must suffer the difficulty of coming to terms with the circumstances and climate of an utterly new place. Fitting in and becoming a local takes time.

In a very general way the process works like this. Experience of the landscape and the trials of making a living spawns story. Stories coalesce into legend which, in time, becomes the foundation of local history. History in time spawns literature. Literature, in turn, begets art and art confirms the experience of place. It is a clumsy process in which they are many false starts and wrong turns. In time, however, we interlopers gradually apply enough persistence and patience to the project of localness to complete the self-reinforcing cultural circle that allows us to claim the difficult and often dangerous West as home.

I don’t need to tell anyone here how important this process is to our unique identity in the mountain West. Once you participate in the larger environment that envelopes where you live, you are gradually shaped by it. You come to notice and appreciate it. Gradually, the moods and nuances of where you live become yours. The country invades you, so to speak, and you call it home.

The great American writer Wallace Stegner called the nostalgia created in our own minds by the landscapes in which we live “a sense of place.” I forgive Wallace Stegner his American-ness because, in fact, he grew up in southern Saskatchewan and returned there forty years later to write the definitive book on sense of place on the prairies called Wolf Willow.

In Wolf Willow, and other books such as The American West As Living Space, The Sound of Mountain Water, Angle of Repose and The Bluebird Sings at Lemonade Springs, Stegner attempted to define the elements that compose the unique relationship to landscape and culture he called “sense of place.”

Though American and Canadian writers and critics have attempted to enlarge his categories some, they remain, in effect, as he articulated them. Sense of place, as defined by Stegner, was composed of three essential elements.

The first is unique geography. A person could only appreciate a sense of place where they lived if they saw the geography of where they lived as special. As I have said so often, it is hard not to feel that way here. The geography of the Rockies leans in on you, it is hard to ignore. Even unseen in darkness and storm, the mountains exert a presence. This presence is sometimes subtle, but it can be profound.

Often people don’t know the physical landscape is reaching into them and making them locals by gradual association if not by choice. Where I live in the Rockies people often stay only briefly and then move on.

I have almost given up establishing close relations with people who come for the summer or for a year, for its breaks my heart to see them constantly leaving just as you got to know and like them. But in departing, they have much to teach about the power of physical landscapes to define a deeper sense of place.

Many people I have met have come to me to explain that they are tired of the tourism trap environment and the high cost of living of Banff and Canmore and are leaving —never, as they so often say, to return again.

I now make it a habit to reserve judgment, for so many have returned two or three years later to stand sheepishly at my door and inevitably their story is always the same. They were in some distant mountain range, the Alps, the Andes or perhaps the Himalaya, and they became unexpectedly aware of a sight, a sound or a smell that reminded them of home. It might have been the perfume of spring pines, the sulphurous stench of newly broken limestone or the colour and scent of fall leaves.

Whatever it was, however, released in them a flood of nostalgia that could only be associated with experiences they had had in the Rockies. At that moment they knew that, like or it not, the Rockies were their home and they would become locals by choice. The geography had finally captured them, and they had come home.
 
The second element of place is a remembered and celebrated history. This history is most often personal or family in nature. You have to have a history in that place. Perhaps you remember the first time you were overtaken by the smell of pines. Or perhaps you recall the excitement and fear that accompanied your first encounter with a bear. You remember the stream where you caught your first fish.

What happened to you is as or more important than the fact that the place around you may have been an exploration route or the site of an early trading post or a particularly interesting section on an early railway line. History starts we us as individuals and then radiates outward toward others.

The third step in coming home to place is related to how personal history merges with the larger history of a community and region. It is the application of personal history to contemporary meaning. An informed sense of place requires that what happened in a given place in the past has meaning in the present.

In reaching this stage in the adoption of place, you suddenly see yourself as part of a continuum in the life and experience of the community in which you have chosen to live. You are part of that continuum and it is part of you. You see how you live reflected in where you live. Suddenly geology and topography have relevance. Suddenly you see why 10,000 years of Native presence matters. You understand the impact of the coming of the railway, not just on your community but on your life.  You see history as a continuum that now only includes you but affects how you and your neighbours live in your time.

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The establishment of this relationship often requires the skilled storytelling of elders, or the informed and enthusiastic interpretation of archaeologists, historians, naturalists and artists. And behind all of these we find the guiding hand of community leaders whose role it is to employ public policy to quietly alter the DNA of place to create community adaptability to changing circumstances over time.

It is in recognition of all of these people that I propose a fourth element of a refined appreciation of where we live be added to Stegner’s remarkable list. Every real place possesses a cast of genuine local characters. These are people steeped in the geography, history and meaning of place who become crystals around which aesthetics are articulated and passed on through time.

It is these people who have made sacrifices that have made them truly worthy and utterly representative of where they live. These are people of such unique character that you immediately want to emulate their sincerity and connection to what is truly meaningful about where they live. In these people, sense of place has become a form of grace. The moment you meet them you want to be like them. There are such people in this room, now. If sense of place has its drivers, it is you. 

While everyone here will feel a certain grounding in where they live, I am sure you agree that sense of place in our society is not what it used to be. Because of increased mobility, real grounding in place is vanishing from our experience. We have so many distractions, and we spend so much of our time running to and fro, it is sometimes difficult to stay grounded in the sense and fact of place.

Michael Crichton is the well known author of books such as Andromeda Strain, Timeline and, of course, Jurassic Park. Though I found his recent novel, State of Fear, irresponsible, Jurassic Park was made into one of my favourite films of all time. In it I find profound symbolism. Imagine ― a dinosaur eating a lawyer.

Like many of us, Michael Crichton is a peripatetic traveler. In his published travel journals, Crichton touches on what is happening to our sense of connection with the places we visit:

… during a trek in Nepal, my Sherpa guide took me to the top of a hill at a place called Ghoripani, pointed to the view and said:

“The Kali-Gandaki Gorge.” Uh-huh, I said, I was sweating and tired. It was cold. My feet hurt. I could hardly pay attention to this view.

“The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he repeated significantly. “Uh-huh,, I said. What I was seeing wasn’t even a gorge, it was just a big valley with snowy mountain peaks on both sides. Spectacular, but all the mountain views in Nepal are spectacular, and I was tired at the end of the day.

“The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he said a third time. Like I still wasn’t getting the point. “Great,” I said. When’s dinner?

It wasn’t until I returned home that I found out what the Kali-Gandaki Gorge is.

The Kali-Gandaki River cuts between the peaks of Dhauligiri to the west and Annapurna to the east ― respectively the sixth and tenth highest mountains in the world.

Both peaks rise more than four miles above the river below, making a canyon so enormous that the eye can hardly see it for what it is. It is four times as deep as the Grand Canyon, and far wider; between the peaks you could roughly fit twenty Grand Canyons.

The Kali-Gandaki Gorge is the deepest canyon in the world. That’s what it is. I’d like to go back and see it some time.

You can’t acquire a sense of place by just reading about it.  To be truly open to the uniqueness of country you have to involve yourself physically in it.  Sense of place is only established when a relationship to a specific landscape or culture captures you and makes you a local by choice. I know this because it happened to me.

Despite these discoveries, I cannot claim that I have been very successful in making sense of place an element we consider in determining what kind of future we want in the mountain West.

In fact, I sometimes feel as though I have witnessed in a single lifetime the destruction of many of the elements of place and community that gave meaning and value to living in the mountain resorts upon which I have, one way or another, depended so long for my livelihood.

As you all know, the qualities of place we have established have become very attractive to outsiders. Current population into the Rockies now resembles an invasion. Over the last ten years, it has happened to almost every community along the spine of the Rockies from Colorado to Valemount. People come from the U.S. or from the coast or from Ontario or from god damned Alberta and they fall in love with the mountain way of life – and they want to stay. At least for the weekend. Some communities have adjust to this. Others have not. I come from one that hasn’t.

I have lived for a very long time in Canmore. Yes, its in Alberta. Like many rural communities in the western mountains, Canmore was founded on a resource-based economy. As I have already pointed out to you, being a resource-based community is not necessarily a bad thing in the context of evolving sense of place.

Three generations of coal miners had created a very solid community.  A focus on family values and common experience related to the mine had become the foundation of shared identity. The neighbourliness they enjoyed can only be found in small towns. There was an unconditional willingness to help one another in times of crisis and to celebrate with one another in times of joy

Unfortunately, people in communities like these, especially if they are located in spectacular places are often forced by economic realities to give way to outsiders who capitalize on a vision that locals were unable to see or completely articulate or perhaps couldn’t afford. 

When the coal mine closed in 1979, many people believed it was the end for Canmore. Locals were frightened. Politicians at the time argued that the town should actively pursue any development that would provide it with a tax base and the foundation for some sort of future. Anything would do as long as it translated into economic development.

We forgot that trees grow back and the wounds mining make on the landscape scar over in time and even heal.

The great majority of people who lived in Canmore were locals by choice. Three generations of locals had sacrificed to be made whole and unique by the place in which they live. In other words, Canmore was a real place.

We believed at that time that the traditions of community created during a century of mining made Canmore a remarkable place to live in its own right. We thought we should at all costs preserve the small-town values that made it rewarding to live in our valley.

We also believed that, with time and a little business training, locals could gradually establish a new economy around the sharing of spectacular nearby landscapes and local culture with visitors. To some extent that happened, but something else happened, too.

In less than half a generation, we have built a new town five times the size of the one to which I moved twenty- six years ago. In 1980, when I arrived the population was 3100. By 1990, the population had increased by 71% to 5300. In 2000, ten years later, the population of Canmore had grown a further 98% to 10,500. Now, just over six years into the new millennium, Canmore is now at about 15,000, which is a 484% increase in population since I moved there.  

Though statistics give an indication of the extent of change, they barely begin to explain the impact of such rapid growth on community identity and dynamics.

The growth of Canmore over the last decade has outstripped the community’s ability to reorganize itself around change. Development of local community values and sense of place has not kept pace with construction and physical growth. The community has begun to wobble under the weight of its own substantial but unequal development.

Visitors or former locals who return after long absences invariably observe that Canmore has altered itself almost beyond recognition. The rate and extent of change has left many long-term residents in a state of shock.

The town has become essentially urban in character. It now has traffic and parking problems. There are multi-light waits at downtown intersections, long lines of cars and trucks at railway crossings and ― perhaps not surprisingly the appearance of a completely new phenomenon ― road rage. Weekenders don’t even notice, but locals do.

The biggest problems, however, are not tied to traffic. They relate to the local cost of living. Many of the people who established the nature and desirable character of Canmore can no longer afford to live here. Other long-time residents argue the town has changed so much that they no longer feel they belong.  A full 50% of the population has lived in the town for less than five years.

The high cost of living also affects other community dynamics. Many newer residents are too busy making a living to have time to become involved civically and accepted in the community. Whether we want to admit or not, there is also growing tension between wealthy retirees and second and third home-owners and struggling locals who feel they are being pushed out of their own town.

Recently a long-time local told a very poignant story about her experience of the changing character of her community. This woman had been invited to a lavish party thrown by a wealthy weekender in honour of one of his local friends.

Her very generous host was lamenting that he and his wife had chosen Canmore because of the excellent relationships they had developed in the local outdoor adventure community. Now that he and his family had moved here to be a bigger part of that community, he was saddened to discover that many of the people he had moved here to be near were leaving.

Standing beside this successful, affable and well-meaning man, the woman simply didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was part of the reason why the people who had made Canmore desirable for him could no longer afford to live here.

Without specific focus, it can take years for the character of a community to catch up with the fact of its own rapid and expansive development. It can take years for new-comers to feel they belong.

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So what did we do wrong and what can you learn from it?

1. We didn’t take the threat seriously. 

Despite the fact that we had expert advice and were personally knowledgeable about what had happened to so many mountain communities from Colorado to Jasper, we simply couldn’t grasp the fact that what had happened elsewhere could happen where we lived. We just didn’t believe it.

It didn’t occur to us until it was too late, that the enemy wasn’t growth so much as it was the deeply ingrained habit everywhere in the West of continuously delaying action on ecological decline and loss of local grounding until further growth has satisfied what are perceived to be more urgent agendas. 

2. We didn’t recognize the extent to which real estate speculation would mask itself as tourism development.

We did exactly what writer Rick Bass argued we shouldn’t do. We let the most meaningful elements of place be divided up into halves, and then quarters and then eighths; then we further divided what was left into the invisibility of neglect and loss.

3. We didn’t have faith in ourselves, our values or in the grandeur of the landscape around us.

Because we were so afraid of missing out on economic development – of any kind - it didn’t occur to us that what we already had was of great value. We didn’t realize until too late that we had choices. We could have created the most extraordinary mountain community in North America. Instead we let our town be swallowed up by outsider self-interest. I wish I could say they took it, but in fact we gave it away.

4. We Were Too Nice

Being pleasant, honest and trusting people, we did not believe that outside interests would exploit our generosity and sincerity through quietly manipulative public relations maneuvers that we later discovered had been employed widely elsewhere.

5. We Could Not Articulate What We Meant By Community Values

Our greatest failing is that we could not articulate what we meant by local values. While we trumpeted our collective desire to preserve the character of our community, we were not effective in providing local politicians with the language they needed to affect leadership in establishing the town’s future.

Because we did not come to common agreement about what was important about where and how we live, we were ultimately unable to articulate local interpretations of worthwhile values in a way that could be acted upon in the community planning process. We had no rallying point, no centre, no meeting place, no way of collectively finding our way through to positive common action.

We moved too fast and grew too quickly. Great people with fresh new ideas came to our community that could have enriched our way of life in unimaginable ways. But there were too many of them and too many of them were just weekenders. It all happened too fast for the impacts to be absorbed.  The Colorado experience has been validated in Canmore. When you approach 40% part-time residency, a community begins to fall apart.

Are there lessons you can learn from us? I hope so.

If you live in a mountain town that is under threat of being overwhelmed, you may want to consider what is important to you about where and how you live and see if you might not be able to make that the attraction.

Get influential people from your community together to articulate what is important about where and how you live so that community leaders know what values and traditions they should aim to preserve through your community’s already existing tourism and land-use planning processes. 

After agreeing on what is important about where and how you live, define the kinds of tourism and economic development you want to have and determine the compromises and sacrifices you are prepared to make to ensure the kind of economic development you want is possible. Then go after the kinds of visitors and new-comers who will be willing to share your generosity in ways that need not destroy local cultural traditions and sense of place.

We have to expect our communities to change. In fact, we need them to change. But growth doesn’t have to mean diminishment. Leaders like Mayor Randall McNair in Fernie are right to suggest that we have to encourage the people who start as weekenders to become full time locals. We have to find ways to get them to stay. But most importantly, we have to stay and if you love where you live you may have to make a stand for what means most to you.
In his book, Becoming Native To This Place, Wes Jackson argues that, in North America at least, it has never been a goal to become native to where you live and to establish deep ties to all aspects of place. He claims that now, almost too late, we are beginning to perceive the necessity of establishing such relationships.

In order to preserve even the possibility of enduring sense of place, Jackson contends that we have to slow down our aimless, wandering pursuit of upward mobility at any cost and find a home, dig in and aim for some kind of enduring relationship with the ecological realities of the surrounding landscape.

Jackson believes that we have to somehow reverse the western frontier tradition of picking up and leaving the moment a place is no longer what we want it to be. We have to learn to stop running away. We have to stay and to stand up for where we live.

Jackson believes that the only way we can restore anything that will remotely resemble our former world is to become native again in our relationship to where we live. We have to become grounded in where we live, establish our own identities through sense of place and stand up for local values.

We have to have confidence in what we are and what we can become. In this period of great change we have to trust in the resilience of Western landscapes and western people.

The frontier era is over and the West awaits its next historic age. We have to create the next best West. It is that map that, as locals in these mountains, we are creating. We forget sometimes that with each decision we make—we are making history. With each decision we make—we are re-making our West.

With prosperity upon us, it is a good time for us to reconsider what kind of West we want. Not just the economic, cultural or virtual landscape we want to create, but the physical West that will provide our inspiration and our solace and shape our deepest identity.

It is not just about money. In defining that West and in making our stand for where and how we live, we must all reach into our hearts for the deepest expression of what makes us our way of life unique and worthwhile. We must find words that will help us define and defend those qualities; and then find the courage to stand by them.

My subject has been sense of place and its drivers. We live in what has been identified globally as one of the best remaining places to live in all the world. This is so because we made it so. This is our place, our most important place. We are the drivers of place. Let’s keep driving.  

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