Walking the earth

How can we communicate experience of place?

Do number, reports, graphs give us the sense of a place? Most of us would reply No, and yet these are what are used in many decisions affecting the environment when deciding on which trees to clear, or where to place construction. However, in pointing out, in The Songs of Trees, that the best global environmental solution is not always obvious  David George Haskell makes the case that:

Ideas and statutes that live only in disembodied intellect are fragile, easily manipulated by both sides in a debate…Knowledge gained through extended, bodily relationship with the forest, including the forest’s human communities, is more robust.
David George Haskell

What about maps? Borges’ cartographers are a perfect example of the inadequacy of maps. In an effort to “attain Perfection” they added more and more to their map, increasing the scale each time, until it was a 1:1 scale and covered their kingdom in On Exactitude in Science.

In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that Map was Useless…
Jorge Luis Borges

Photographs perhaps? Emma Cocker refers to the “glitch in photography’s promise” in that:

the image only infrequently captures the experience of the moment, more often stripping the event of meaningful content. Arguably the photographic memento of travel is only ever a pale echo of experiential encounter with a place, its documentary value serving merely as an aide-mémoire for those who participated in the actual journey.

In the same article, published in Nature (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), she compares the syntax that pauses and blank spaces in a series of projected photographs produce in Heather and Ivan Morison’s Earthwalker to the rhythms of walking, injecting a narrative into the images. So perhaps photographs can communicate some of the experience of places in the way in which they are grouped and presented (although rarely in a single image).

Walking…carries the possibility of breathing life, introducing a temporal beat or narrative into the abstract spatial grid or dead text of the map. Both the photograph and the pedestrian act can thus be used as a means of disrupting the way in which things are habitually seen, presenting a more contingent and revelatory notion of space.
Emma Cocker

This narrative-creation may be a part of the solution: Christoper Tilley contrasts maps with narrative in A Phenomenology of Landscape:

Spatial stores are about the operations and practices which constitute places and locales. The map, by contrast, involves a stripping away of these things.
Christopher Tilley

These writers address a central problem that occurs every time we try to communicate place-knowledge to others, whether it is a rural or an urban place that we are describing: numbers, maps, even photographs do not and can not tell the full story. Does that mean we should give up? Heck, no. But it does mean that there is no good substitute for experience, that we need to at least visit a place and spend time with its inhabitants (animal, insect, plant or human) before we make judgements about its value or continued existence.