Community and the Politics of Place. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1991 by Freeman House

How is it, asks author Daniel Kemmis, that in the American West, after 200 years of evolution of a government designed to protect the rights of private persons, we have been able to arrive at no more satisfying a construct for considering land-use- issues than the "procedural republic"? in the procedural republic, the only courses of action available to the public citizen lie in indignant confrontation with either the excesses of individualism or the institutionalized wrongheadedness of regulatory bureaucracies. The swings of this pendulum ore usually reversed in a court of low, areating a theater of engagement where "anyone con wreck anything," and often does.

Kemmis clearly identifies the cult of individualism and the inflexibility of regulatory systems as opposite sides of the some coin. Breaking free of the idiot routine of flipping this some coin over and over is done by constructing a sense of the common good - the element that has always been missing in the classic American mandate to protect the rights of the individual, "the unencumbered self." After two centuries, the only common good powerful enough to break these habits is embodied in the actual, physical common ground - in particular places - as experienced by the people who live in them.

This slim book is one of those journeys where getting there is as good as being there. Kemmis provides o lively tour through the thought of Jefferson and the Federalists, the 19th-century populists, the closing of the Western frontier, and the insights of Wendell Berry, Hannah Arendt, and others. Years of elective office have not dulled Kemmis's powers as o ruminative philosopher or as an articulate speaker for place-based hope.

Kemmis reconsiders some basic premises. He redefines the concept of civic virtue as the assumption of responsibility for particular places. He considers shored inhabitation as both the motive and the goal of the polis. He challenges us to work out our future from where we stand now, literally, shoulder to shoulder with our neighbors and fellow inhabitants, even if we don't like them. Especially if we don't like them. The single idea that may have the most affective vigor in this amalgam of vigorous ideas is his notion that cities once more become regional hubs: A politics of inhabitation may well be one in which cities and their hinterlands, together are understood as a basic political unit."

Bioregionalists have been making such claims for years, but few bioregionalists hove tested their ideas against practical tasks, as Kemmis has as the mayor of Missoula, Montana. This is book to pass on to your most thoughtful county supervisor or to a leader on the other side of the current struggle.

* The region cannot transcend its colonial heritage until it gains a much more substantial measure of indigenous control over its own land and resources. But it con neither gain nor exercise that control until the left and the right gain enough trust in each other, and establish a productive enough working relationship, to enable them to agree, at least roughly, on what they would seek to accomplish if they had such control. Certainly such agreement will not be easily achieved, but the time has come to turn and face each other and begin working toward it. Until that happens, the pattern of decision making about vast stretches of western land and vast stores of its resources will be simply a variation on the scene in Dubois. The end of those federally controlled debates is always a less satisfying way of inhabiting the place than any of the participants would have chosen. As more and more people become dissatisfied with this lessthan-zero-sum solution of the procedural republic, it is time to look the alternative in the face. The alternative carries two inescapable implications: a challenge to nationally centralized control of western resources, and a new capacity for western adversaries to work out their own destiny among themselves.

* This shoring of responsibility between the human and the natural extends also to the question of the scope or scale of the political entity. Over what domain is political will to be exercised? In our time, we have come to assume that answering this question is strictly a human responsibility. So humans draw lines on the land, marking off nations, states, and counties. But as the challenge of inhabitation makes itself felt in the political sphere, it becomes clear that this drawing of lines should not, perhaps, be left entirely to human choice. Too often, the lines cut across natural units of inhabitation, leaving inhabitants cut off from each other in terms of their capacity to act together politically to vill a common world.

* It is important to keep in mind that the concept of "place" enters into this situation in a literal as well as a metaphorical way. The pulp mill and the local environmental group were brought to the point of collaboration because both of them had a stake in what happened to a particular place. They had different stakes, and had they been left to themselves, they would have done different things with the place, but in the end it \vas one and the same place. Neither party wanted to leave the place, and both recognized that what Lester Thurow says of territoriality in such a case is true: neither side could gain a decisive or lasting victory over the other (although they were both free to use the procedural republic in an attempt to win). Once they recognized that the procedural republic was not likely to serve them well, they were thrown back on collaboration (on citizenship). But what holds people together long enough to discover their power as citizens is their common inhabiting of a single place. No matter how diverse and complex the patterns of livelihood may be that arise within the river system, no matter how many the perspectives from which people view the basin, no matter how diversely they value! it, it is, finally, one and the same river for- everyone. There are not many rivers, one for each of us, but only this one river, and if we all want to stay here, in some kind of relation to the river, then we have to learn, somehow, to live together.