Who Are We? Where Are We?
David Greenwood explores these lifelong questions
This bonus newsletter is a monthly feature for paid subscribers. These extras showcase edited interviews with someone whose work intersects in some way with this newsletter’s focus—place, history, writing. I hope you enjoy this one and those to come.
Introduction
At a mutual friend’s house about 15 years ago, I first met David A. Greenwood. Within a few months, we were part of a small group that met regularly, and I learned firsthand of his deep thinking and feeling about the natural world. A renowned professor of environmental education, David recently retired from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where he had served as a Canada Research Chair. David’s academic work has been groundbreaking, but as you’ll read below, the academic world has been too narrow to contain his commitments and enthusiasms.
Adam Sowards
Who are you, and how do you describe your work?
David Greenwood
I've been thinking a lot about that, especially since I got cancer and survived. What comes to mind is I'm a kind of philosopher.
Your question reminds me of questions I've been puzzling over for the last four years. It's the one that Thoreau asked on top of Mount Katahdin. He climbed this mountain with his cousin and friends and finds it's a lot wilder than he thought it would be up there. It wasn't the cozy pondside cabin on the outskirts of Concord. It was a real wildness way up in Maine. When he came off the mountain, he asked, Who are we? Where are we?
So who am I? I'm someone who puzzles and struggles with such questions for myself and also for the collective. Who are we as a collective? Can we even talk about a collective? I think we should. I know it's hard.
So Who are we? Where are we? My work has been to find some way to pose those questions to myself and other people. I retired as an environmental education professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. It’s rugged wild country up here. Cold. That was one of the contexts where I did this work, but it’s really more of a way of life for me. How do we become who we are, where we are. That's the difficult challenge that we're all faced with. And how we answer these questions creates what we call the environment, locally and globally.
I never get bored with the territory that these questions carve out.
Adam
When or why (or both) did you decide to become, or realize you were, a philosopher and practitioner of place-based or land-based living and learning. Maybe relatedly, can you describe the first place that really imprinted on you?
David
In the environmental education world, we talk a lot about early childhood experiences. Just like in every other aspect of our lives, it's super formative.
Our early childhood experiences with the environment or geography, or places, these have a deep impact on our identity one way or the other. Sometimes they set us up for wanting to get away from a place. Oftentimes, they set us up for deep attachments, a feeling of belonging and rightness connected to the place.
I've actually been looking at some childhood pictures. There is this one of my sister and me in the Rocky Mountains during a family vacation. We were visiting our aunt who worked on a dude ranch in Granby, Colorado. I am not yet 4. This was the summer of 1968. The photograph is color, grainy, on Kodak paper. My sister is about 5, and my aunt Mary is in her early twenties.
In the picture it’s clear that my aunt is trying to corral us. She and my sister both have wincing faces, and their eyes are tightly closed. You can tell by their body language, we're in the middle of one of those Rocky Mountain cloudbursts, a real downpour. My aunt is trying to cover heads and she’s got her arms around both of us like she’s going to rescue us. She’s wearing a cowboy hat.
But I look at myself, and my posture is just remarkable. I’m this little boy, and I've got my head tilted back to the sky. I have this spiritual glow of ecstasy, holding my hands open to the rain, letting the rain wash my face.
When I saw that photograph, it confirmed a thought that I long held that my love for nature, the natural world, the land, creation, has always been profound. I was very connected to nature and the outdoors even before developing a deep attachment to place, which I soon did.
The way I story this is that I attached to two places simultaneously. I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison, we have one of the most famous arboretums in the world, the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. Twelve hundred acres right in the middle of town. It was literally out my backyard. That's where I grew up. The Arboretum that Aldo Leopold helped create, where John Curtis did all of his work on plants. It has this historic pedigree, but mainly, it was a wild space where I could run natural, wild, and free, as Leopold says.
It was intentionally a diverse landscape. Prairie, conifer forest, mixed hardwood forest, wetland, and lake. I loved it all but spent the most time in Curtis Prairie. It’s the largest restored prairie in the world. When you're in that prairie, as a kid, you might have heard about the prairie grasses tickling the shoulders of the buffalo as they went through. I mean, as a kid, the prairie grasses might as well have been sequoias. They're so tall.
So that was one of my deep attachments.
my love for nature, the natural world, the land, creation, has always been profound.
I developed an equally deep attachment, but of a different kind, on a lake in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where my grandpa had bought a cottage after he retired. I was able to be there a lot growing up starting at age 9. That's where I was able to really wander and have solo, timeless, wondering experiences on the land and in the water. I learned then of my insatiable capacity for solitude and stillness with land, my insatiable capacity to sit and listen to a place, which I never tire of doing.
Adam
You visited, maybe even made pilgrimages, to places where writers you admire lived and wrote. This includes at least Thoreau’s Walden Pond and Carson's cottage on the Maine coast. I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the past is present in places like that. As a historian, I'm really interested in how past is always present. You're not a historian, but I'm interested in how someone like you experiences the past in places like that.
David
I'll gently push back a little bit that I'm not a historian. True, I’m not a professionalized historian. But I think anyone with an interest in the past is a kind of historian. Part of the reason I do the work that I do is because I'm much more interested in experience and learning than I am in the disciplinary boundaries that frustrate learning, so yes I look at the past, historically, with thousands of generations of lived experience.
My interest in time is decades long and very sincere and in a real sense quite an expression of a devotion. I think this is pretty common with aging when people begin to get interested in ancestry and legacy.
The first thing I want to say, though, before I talk about my pilgrimages to some well-known places, is that I'm very aware that in the field of environmental studies broadly with environmental education that to pursue traditional nature writers like Leopold, Carson, and Thoreau is often looked upon with great suspicion. The reason for that is because of the exclusion of so many other voices in what might be called traditional environmental history or traditional white people’s nature writing.
Fortunately, that silence has been addressed now for about 20 years in a very deep way. Not that it solved anything, though, as I’m sure you’re aware. In fact, what I witnessed is that it created a lot more camps, a lot of divisiveness, and a lot of missed opportunities for common ground.
My interest in time is decades long and very sincere and in a real sense quite an expression of a devotion.
I want to take us back to your first question, Who am I? This is part of what I've really wanted to do in my work is instead of continuing to be frustrated by a political environment where a political lens was the only appropriate one to apply to inquiry and ideas about place and land. I started to feel that the politicization of our experience with land, and life, to be much too narrow a lens that come with its own kinds of silences and exclusions.
Part of my learning journey has been to try to go back to some of the things that first inspired me as a thinker and to reexperience them and to reappreciate what's there that is good in spite of all of the suspicion that surrounds embracing these dead white European males and females.
What I know through my understanding of the world is that there's a lot of good in the Western canon, a whole hell of a lot of good mixed in with the bad. Of course, the history of colonialism is monstrous, just atrocious. But that doesn't mean that within my tradition—here, I’m being a historian—there are strands of beauty and goodness and truth, and I need those things. I want to appreciate, even recover them.
I consider Carson and Thoreau and Leopold and many others to be part of an ancestry worth revisiting often. It's part of my not just literary ancestry, but my intellectual, my spiritual, my existential ancestry. I want to know them better.
That's why I went to where they lived and worked, because in reading their biographies, I noticed that they had something that I had, which was a deep attachment to places. I wanted to consider the origin and evolution of their work and where it's gone over decades and centuries from the perspective of the place that inspired them most, the place that fed the stream that still feeds the world through their work because they're still relevant and not going out of style, despite continuing, and in many cases unwarranted, suspicion. A few years ago, for example, the New Yorker published a piece writing Thoreau off as “pond scum.” We need to be very careful about dismissing the past so flippantly.
Adam
You closed your essay, “Place, Land, and the Decolonization of the Settler Soul,” with this line: “The goal is never to live someone else's story, but to live as well as we can our own story of being and becoming and to learn to give this story voice in the presence of others wherever we find ourselves.” I'd like to ask you to unpack that a little bit. I'm especially interested in the part about giving voice in the presence of others. What forms might that take, and why is that so important?
David
I really believe it, and I hope you felt in my final academic essay that that was really leaning toward a more spiritually inflected narrative. That's what I’m wanting to give voice to there.
Let me answer your question about others. I’ll quote the poet Mary Oliver, one of our great environmental writers, revered for helping others pay closer attention to nature. In one of her poems, she has a section called “Instructions for Life.” They are so good, so simple, but not easy.
“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Telling about it is giving it voice.
That’s it. That’s what we need to do. But what do we pay attention to? This is where politics and huge issues like climate change can come in and take all the attention at the expense of noticing the larger conversation with land and all the beings on it. I'm astonished at the miracle of being alive. I'm astonished at the beauty of this planet. I'm astonished that under this deep, deep history, we've seen and continue to see both beauty and atrocity. We hurt each other and the land and still have the capacity to love. I'm astonished at the rain hitting our pond right now like it hasn’t happened in months. And the wind, right now, is making quicksilver of the surface of the pond. It is amazing.
“Pay attention / Be astonished / Tell about it.”
Oliver is one of the great masters of creating poetry of the act of attention to the natural world. And she's telling about it. She's also inviting us to pay attention ourselves, to cultivate our capacity for attention, and to tell about it, because we need to share these moments of wonder in a culture that's got so much bad blood circulating in it.
We need to remember that we love the world and that we love the world in common.
All over the world, people from different political, religious, economic, cultural, ethnic backgrounds love the world. We need to tell about how and why and where we love the world so we can understand more about how common we are to one another.
We need to tell about more than our suffering. I know that as a recent cancer survivor. You can get stuck. You can get stuck in an identity. You can get stuck in an illness. You can get stuck in a mood. There are so many opportunities in this world for loving it. I really think that that is our inheritance, our birthright. And at some level, it's our responsibility.
We have the ability to respond to the world with wonder and love. How can we learn to do that more? We need to tell about how we do it. How do we respond to the world with wonder and love, gratitude? Wherever that’s happening I think there’s a good story worth telling.
We need to tell about how and why and where we love the world so we can understand more about how common we are to one another.
Adam
You spent a successful career as an academic, but that's never been all that defines your work. You've written both for and beyond academia. Could you speak about the choices you make around that? Are you asking and answering the same questions in your academic and nonacademic writing and just framing them and composing them differently? Or are you exploring different things?
David
I really feel it's the same conversation for a different audience. Looking back twenty-five years I see that my early successes publishing as a young professor got me stuck in a sort of rut. I kept getting invited to write and talk about critical place-based education, a perspective toward place that blends critical cultural analysis with deep ecological thinking.
Academic writing tends to be incredibly repetitive and insular, and it killed my creativity. So I have always dabbled with the essay form, with narrative, and in that writing I do think I’m working the same ground but with more life in it. More of the actual experience of being alive as opposed to the argument and the evidence which, for me, make academic writing claustrophobic. As I said earlier, the questions Who are we? Where are we, are endlessly interesting and inexhaustible. They are for everyone. Talking or writing about these from the perspective of lived experience, through conversation or a creative essay, leads us to nature and culture and politics, but in a way that is more like living and less like being lectured to.
And if we ask who we are, if you want to go deeper and wider, you start to approach questions of spirituality and religion, which are effectively banned from academe.
But where do we come from? What's our origin story? These are spiritual and religious questions, and I think we need to encourage each other to develop this dimension of experience.
So: Who are we? Where are we? I believe that everything I've ever written and taught in the last 30 years has been a kind of a strand of the conversation in response to these questions. I guess I’ve been pretty consistent. Yes, I'm positive there's no outlier. I didn't write anything that wasn't dabbling with that in some way.
Talking or writing about these from the perspective of lived experience, through conversation or a creative essay, leads us to nature and culture and politics, but in a way that is more like living and less like being lectured to.
Adam
My newsletter focuses on place, history, and writing. Choose one of those and tell me why you think it's important to you and maybe why it should be important to others.
David
Oh, boy. Well, I have to choose place. It's a “no brainer” for me because I feel like it's the most accessible entry point: we all live somewhere and all of us have places we love. Place has great potential for being a meeting ground where we can tell about it, tell about who we are, where we are, our experience of being alive in the world.
I also think it's just it's just so vital that whether you're a historian or a writer or whatever that we take care of our places. I have a new indigenous friend from Colombia who came over and walked the woods with me on our land here. It had been a silent walk together. After the walk, he looked at me and he said, “Thank you for taking care of the land.” I've never felt like I received a better compliment from someone from an indigenous culture. He was able to see that that I love this land with very little exchange of words.
I love this place, and I feel like one of the best things that anyone can do is to take care of a piece of land. I'm with Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold and Robin Kimmerer and many, many, many others who know that that's part of our ultimate work. I also know that we're never going to do it alone. It's not enough that we just take care of our own so-called property.
We need to do the best we can to tell about it and invite others into the work of taking care of not just the land, but each other on the land and all the other creatures and so-called inanimate beings that share this world with us, this beautiful, messed up world.
Adam
That's perfect. Do you want to add anything?
David
I want to say that one thing we haven't talked about is the role of wisdom traditions, sometimes called religion, sometimes called philosophy, sometimes just called life, culture, oral traditions. I think that they have a huge role to play.
As I wrote about in that article that you quoted from, I don't think that most academics are really ready to talk about the environment until they start exploring their own spirituality much more deeply and are able to talk about it.
I think, ultimately, the questions that we're talking about are existential questions that have power and significance way beyond rational discourse and that there are other ways of knowing—embodied, intuitive, spiritual—that are not well served with the academic voice or the rational mind.
So there's a lot of territory here we didn't cover because of the assumptions that have governed our conversation has excluded these as important. Both of us have enacted it. I've held back my deep conviction that environmental work has to include a deep spiritual dimension. Of course, definitions are tough and unpacking that would take hours! But I need more practice that is for sure.
But I put this out there as kind of a tease, that there's this whole other realm and it's the realm that I think is the most important. The spiritual and religious realm. Thank you, Adam.
Explore David’s Work
David wisely limits his social media presence. You can find his many publications linked to his Google Scholar profile.