In The Land That Could Be, William Shutkin argues that protection of the environment can only be achieved through the grounding of the movement in democratic participation and civic discourse. Through a focus on people and connections rather than on specific media or pollutants. This isn't a unique argument. But it's a perspective that one often forgets, when one is studying law.

This he recognizes.

In fact, he strongly criticizes the mainstream environmental law community for this very oversight. He characterizes this movement as "professional," emphasizing federal environmental policy rather than grassroots participation. Then he notes: "Professionals tend to be migratory and cosmopolitan in their disposition, hopping from metropolis to metropolis with barely an opportunity along the way to become attached to a particular place." He cites Christopher Lasch's statement that professionals have "a tourist's view of the world--not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy."

This tourism aspect of professionalism has always always disturbed me as well. I must note that I both relish and fear my mobility. I do believe that mobility can connect people. But rather than creating a "global village," and a sense of the whole earth as "our place," mobility seems to have led to a sense of "no place." We can go everywhere, but no place is ours. When every place can be home, no place is home.

My classmates, many of whom feel so free to pick and choose where they go, go to the same places. The big cities. Which would be great and beautiful if they cared for those cities, contributed to their communities. But I'm not sure they do. If a city is an eyesore, they can always move. They do not feel the need to reinvigorate the fallen cores, both physically and socially. They live, ensconced, in suburbania. Or isolated "nice areas." They can always move.

Shutkin provides a beautiful quote about place. He quotes poet Gary Snyder: "Of all the memberships we identify ourselves by (racial, ethnic, sexual, national, class, age, religious, occupational), the one that is most forgotten, and that has the greatest potential for healing, is place. We must learn to know, love, and join our place even more than we love our own ideas. People who can agree that they share a commitment to the landscape--even if they are otherwise locked in struggle with each other--have at least one deep thing to share."

My dislike of tourism comes from more than just that tourists lack the environmental incentives that having a "place" provides. My classmates tour. They travel. They go to far away places, but many do not work there, many do not live there. Or they work in a different area because it is "exotic," "exciting." Not because they want to make it their home. Or even because they want to experience it as a home, which is different, but I believe possible. They go there to experience it as an "other."

Many of them are white, and take for granted the opportunity they have to have a home, to have a place of belonging--something those of us from diasporic backgrounds do not have. Many of them are white, and do not have the fears that Edward Said captured so well in Orientalism. The perception of places, indeed, even cultures, not on their own terms, but on the terms of a dominant "majority" culture--here, the culture of young urban professionals.

I want to have a sense of place. I agree wholeheartedly that having a place, being grounded in a place, leads to us protecting better not only our physical surroundings, but also the communities within. But I come from diasporic roots. My parents are immigrants, and none of these places we've lived was ever truly a home to them. We moved a lot (though always through the South) because every place was as good as the last. And they've passed this sense, to some extent, onto me.

But even if they hadn't, I'm not sure that I have the same opportunities to establish my own sense of place. Even if my parents did not feel as if their "home" was still Hong Kong, my surrounding community would never let me forget that I am not "from from" here, even when I am from here.

So I must build my own conception of place, and my own conception of my place. I do not want to tour, but I do move to find my place. I do not mean a house, or any of the isolationist trappings that urban professionals often use to protect them from the "bad" outside. I want a place, a living environment, a locale, a community to enjoy and of which to take care.

DC is not my place. I feel disconnected, I feel lost. It is why I think I must move, even though there are opportunities here I will not have elsewhere. I want to find my place, but I don't know where to find it. Do I find it where I grew up? Or where I first felt accepted? Or do I shuck this whole argument and go where I can "do the most good?" ¹ I do not know. I have no place now, and I want to protect and enjoy every place, every community within. But I also want to have my place to protect and to cherish. I don't want to be a tourist.

(Okay, I can't think of a good transition.) Shutkin also criticizes privatization as anti- democratic, something that also echoes what I've believed. That by privatizing, by allowing the "free" market to take over, we merely trade one form of governance for another. And that type of governance, corporate governance, is not accountable to people as individuals, but to people as money-holders. A good quote Shutkin provides by Benjamin Barber: "[Privatization] pretends to save government from its top-heaviness by sliding power down the scale and empowering the local and parochial . . . [but] only shifts power from the public to the private sector, leaving it as centralized and hegemonic as before, but liberated from democratic constraints like elections. . . . Privatization is not about limiting government; it is about terminating democracy."

By the way, this is the sort of book that makes me weepy.

1. (052200) I mentioned this book and this whole entire argument to Professor Echeverria today, and talked to him about my internal dilemmas about What I Should Do, and how I think I should serve my community. Meaning Memphis. Doing grassroots community building. He agreed with the point of the book. But when it came to my personal direction, he looked at me strangely and said, "But you are a technocrat. You're trained to be a technocrat. All you've ever done is chemistry and law. That's technocratic."

It's true, he has a point. But it's a fallacy of sunk costs kind of point, isn't it? Or is it? He thinks I'd be a good technocrat, and a bad community builder. Maybe he's right. I don't know.