I'm Struck in this Place

Like John Price, I hold vivid memories of the flood of '93. I was seven years old, moving from Kansas City, MO to Ravenwood, a small town of 400 about 100 miles north of Kansas City. So many of the Missouri tributaries had flooded their banks along with major rivers like the Missouri and Mississippi. I remember sitting in the back of our car and staring at what should have been corn fields. In some places, I could still see the tops of corn stalks; in others, just water. Not too far from Ravenwood, I saw a man strapped to water skis glide along the top of his corn field, or what I assume was his corn field.

It was one of the most amazing and terrible things I'd ever seen. Of course, I didn't understand that at the time. I only thought it was cool that I was moving to place where people water skied wherever they wanted. Price's article got me thinking about that flood and conflicting ideas about the constant and inconstant nature of environment. The flood of '93 is probably a flood that has occurred a thousand times in the history of this place and will continue to occur for many years after America is no more. Price hints at this notion, perhaps inadvertently, when he talks about thinking vertically and the ever-changing weather of the Midwest (we all know that's still around) (7). Yet, he also points to how malleable environment can be, and that's easy to see as one of man's most constant struggles is to control his environment, damming rivers, cutting forests, tilling earth.

The most important aspect of Price's essay, I think, is the posited symbiotic relationship between man and place that really already exists. He utilizes the writing of Wallace Stegner to do so. "Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy ... until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging" (qtd. in Price 16). This is the system I see championed on the Ribbons of the Prairie website as well. "It's easy to take our surrounding for granted. And yet it's often a connection with the outdoors that makes us appreciate where we live"(pairieplains.org, SOAR and Other Education). Using language like "connection" and "appreciate" paints the picture of a movement that isn't radical but that can enact a radical change via an established relationship between person and place.

What I cannot get on board with so much is Wes Jackson's idea that what is needed is to "arrest consumerism" (98). Why do I disagree with it? Because that idea won't work; it hasn't worked. It's not even that I don't wish this were possible, I do, but this approach clearly doesn't work. I'm currently sitting in my office surrounded by material things, writing on a laptop, at a university that surely used to be prairie grassland. I'm guessing no one can convince the 24,000 students here that they shouldn't have Iphones, that they shouldn't be striving for economic success and material wealth. If someone does try, good luck.

It's an interesting struggle, especially at present and in the future because so much of "place" has a negative ecological impact. Farmers till land, people build malls, universities, and huge apartment complexes, and now, those things are a part of who we are. They're a part of our place too. That's why movements like the Ribbons of the Prairie site are right on. They're looking at change in a very subtle but important way. It's almost like they see the seeds of change as understanding the tension that exists between where we are and where we've been, understanding that when leaving a place to gain something you lose something else and vice versa.