NAI Blog

I’ve always been a believer in the concept best know as “sense of place.” There are multiple definitions for sense of place. Most revolve around the perception humans have involving the natural and cultural landscape connected to a particular location. Interpretation focuses on making intellectual and emotional connections with a resource, which sounds a lot like fostering a sense of place for our audience.

Photo by Fred Fokkelman

In the budding field of ecopsychology, psychologists are looking at this phenomenon in more detail. A recent New York Times Magazine article examined this new area of ecopsychology as an attempt to examine the interaction between the human psyche and the ecosystem. The idea is that nature can optimize the human mind according to a recent article from Peter Kahn in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. His study reported that humans who were mildly stressed recovered from stress more quickly when exposed to nature than those who were exposed to natural scenes on a plasma TV. Real, authentic nature seems to have an important effect on our sense of well being.

The alternate condition might be termed “placelessness,” a location that is devoid of any unique feature, culture or character. More and more of our urban landscapes are sanitized, homogenized locations where “sameness” is all too common. Take a walk through any big mall or community of tract homes and you might be hard put to distinguish that place from thousands of others in this country. On top of this placelessness, many locations where we live now suffer deteriorating environmental quality, leading to an even more serious phenomenon termed “solastalgia” by Dr. Glenn Albrecht, professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia. He defined solastalgia as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

Ecopsychologists are observing this condition of solastalgia in such diverse cases as communities exposed to large mining operations to native populations that have experienced changing uses of their lands. So far, those instances have been localized, but the looming possibilities of climate change or large scale pollution may expose whole sections of the planet to solastalgia, in effect destroying our sense of place.

One of the first things we have to do is to help every person experience a proper sense of place, to form a relationship with a healthy environment. If people know and understand how important it is to maintain those unique features in our landscape (built, natural, cultural), perhaps we’ll fight actions that lead to placelessness and environmental degradation. That’s where interpreters come in, helping to connect people to the most important things in the world around them. If the ecopsychologists are correct, our sense of place is directly related to our sense of well being—our health, both physical and mental—depends upon a healthy environment. If we do this well, perhaps we can increase another phenomenon, “soliphilia: the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.”

If you’d like to learn more, follow this link to the article from the NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html .