Excerpt from This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence

From Chapter One: "Place: August"

I am back in Seattle. I am exhausted, lonely, and off balance. The damp air smells disconcertingly like childhood. At the moment, being here feels like defeat. It reminds me of the times when my brother and sister swam out to the log and I turned tail and crawled onto the beach.

I am haunted by the fear that by coming here I have turned tail from the cause that has occupied my last decade. I tell myself I am changing tactics, but I do not always trust this idea. At a minimum, I cannot fully explain my reasons for being here, nor why I am so determined to stay.

I came here, I suppose, to find out what it means to live responsibly in desperate times. Perhaps I came here in hopes of finding out what permanence would look and feel like and to practice it while we still have the chance. Perhaps I came to confront head-on the pain and paradox of living in an economy that seems to thrive on the death of nature. Maybe I came here in the hope that place might be the escape hatch for a fractured society hurtling toward the environmental brink.

All I can say with confidence is that I came here because, a year ago, a grinning barefoot peasant in the Philippines pitied me--the one thing I could not stand--and her pity became like a seed in my shoe. It sprouted, grew into my dreams, and tormented me. It sent me scurrying to the only place that ever felt like home. And it put down a tap root that has now bound me here, in this moss-cloaked neighborhood where everything is smaller than my memories."

More information on the book

We all want to experience a stronger sense of community and permanence, but what does that mean in our everyday lives? Emphasized in the title and throughout the book is the power of home, of staying put. Yet Durning doesn't live on a farm where he grows his own organic produce. He doesn't live in a cabin out in the wilderness. He lives where most people in North America live, in a city. He lives in a declining neighborhood across the street from what appears to be a crack house. History and facts of the Northwest blend with personal experiences of 31-year-old Durning, his wife Amy and their three children. These vignettes, some deeply personal, offer a reality check and help make conclusions drawn elsewhere in the book all the more meaningful, both easier to take and take to heart.

"Humanity's failure to act in defense of the Earth is conventionally explained as a problem of knowledge: Not enough people yet understand the dangers or know what to do about them. An alternative explanation is a problem of motivation. People know enough, but they do not care enough. They do not care enough because the do not identify themselves with the Earth as a whole. The Earth is such a big place, that it might as well be no place at all.

Not just about making a greener environment, This Place on Earth is about bread and butter issues of jobs and economics. "We humans are in a bind," says Durning. "We're living in an economy that thrives on the death of nature. Our way of life is the most successful at generating material wealth in history. It is also the most environmentally destructive. In the end, there is no more wealth on a dead planet. But the cruelest irony of all is that the whole flood of human enterprise is made up of decent, hardworking men and women. All along the way, individual people have been making rational choices. The system is what needs changing, not people's values."

This book is not so much an argument for environmental protection as an argument for sanity," he adds. "Almost everywhere you look, if you look hard enough, you will see that an environmentally unsustainable economy is also an inefficient economy, an antisocial economy, and an anticommunity economy."

It may be possible to diagnose global problems globally, but impossible to solve them globally. There may not be any ways to save the Earth that are not, first and foremost, ways for people to save their own places. People must begin with place, and specifically--one place.
Durning is optimistic, even after having looked unblinkingly at the situation we're in. "The pieces of the puzzle already exist," he insists. "Quality of life is the engine of our economy. Thousands of people applying their irrepressible ingenuity will fix the earth's problems in nothing flat--if they accept the challenge."

"There tends to be a gap between Seattle the idea and Seattle the reality," he notes in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "In thinking about Seattle as a place in the mental geography of North America, it is a rainy city full of virtuous people who sail all summer and ski all winter. In reality, of course, it is a city like any other, full of traffic jams and pollution and crime. If I were a disinterested observer, I'd probably have to give an unoptimistic prediction. But I am not. I'm Seattle-born. I have Seattle-born children, and I believe that if the Pacific Northwest--the greenest part of the richest society in history--can't reconcile people and nature, it probably cannot be done. If it can, it will set an example for the world."

If places motivate but planet does not, the only cure possible, says Durning, may be local and motivated by a sentiment--the love of home.

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