Embeddedness, Part One — A Primer
Staying in Place, “Relationships Good Enough to Trust,” and Ecological Pain.
We’ve got friends — good people — moving away from this town of roughly 1,000. We’ve only been here three years or so — ourselves leavers of another place — and it’s not the first or second time this has happened. You know someone, and you envision a future with them in it — here, where here is bettered by them — and it doesn’t work out that way. To be clear, I don’t blame them. We’ve been there. But I do lament the loose ties we have to places. I yearn for the stability that the word “embeddedness,” at least to me, has come to represent. I sense some potency in the term.
Forgive me for ignoring the causes behind the absence of embeddedness — all of the standard push and pull factors, chasing education and jobs, the commodification and homogenization of places, housing pressures, the desire for instant gratification, “grass is greener” thinking, and so on. All of these matter, yes, but I want to focus on “embeddedness” the term, itself.
The first thing that comes to mind is staying put — staying in a place for a significant time. When zones of conflict are active, embedded journalists stay. An embedded metal shard, a glint in your heel, has staying power. And to be embedded in a community or a place generally means to have lived there for some time. An evacuating Black Hawk’s thunder shakes while the tip of the tweezers scrape and search, both saying: removal isn’t easy.
In this case, the difficulty of removal is good. I’ll sing praise of generations in place and cultures that foster good living and learning without having to leave. The organization I work for has a guiding ethos of envisioning communities “where the economy and culture are rooted in restoration of earth and its people.” Those efforts spring from time and geographic focus.
My friend David Blower picked up on the ancient Greek word “pistis,” a fairly common term found in Greek mythology and the New Testament. If you’ve spent a little time studying the Bible, it’s easy, generally translated as “faith.” If you’ve spent more than a bit of time studying the Bible, it’s more difficult to pin down.
David thinks translating “pistis” as “faith” doesn’t do it justice. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it carries an anachronistic bent — it’s a word simplified and diminished. It’s no longer understood to have much relevance to the “social and political dimension,” which it should. And “allegiance,” another proposal for “pistis,” leans “militant and coercive in a way that undermines the meaning of relational trust.” David takes a different approach (detailed here.)
He works with that word, so often translated as “faith,” as a term meaning “relationships good enough to trust.” These relationships are integral to economy and culture “rooted in restoration of earth and its people.” Until we’ve uncovered networks of dependable care, reciprocity, and honesty, we have no choice except to depend on laws, rulers, hierarchies, systems, and institutions as relational guardrails. These forms of “power-over” are less beholden to the long-term care and awareness, forgiveness, and mutual aid that natural restoration grows from.
In the spirit of not knocking something down unless I have something better to offer, I propose small and comprehensible movements towards “relationships good enough to trust.” (The next essay will consider these actions more specifically.)
Quality of relationship plays into embeddedness. Beyond how long you’ve been in a place — how are you in a place? How do you relate to the land? How do you relate to other beings? Your orientation towards all that is other matters. If you’re mindful of working on those relationships and endeavoring to accept the bundled obligations and responsibilities, you’re likely embedded. But you’re also likely suffering for it.
How? If embeddedness has a dimension of caring about how things relate and being responsive to cause and effect, it sounds like ecological understanding. What does the tamarack swamp have to do with winter bedding spots for buck? How do unseasonably warm temperatures in February shape the health of annually tapped maples? What role does a northern hardwood forest, untouched for a decade, fulfill for biota, as opposed to a managed red pine plantation? And if I follow the glowing energy powering this computer straight to the outlet, past the service panel, up along the powerline, and beyond the substation, where do I ultimately end up? Forget the internet — considering what is around us and how everything is tied together connects the world. Of course, this takes time and observation, so the size of the webbed networks we can thoughtfully relate to is limited. But we can grow to understand better our agency and dependencies, our identities and roles, and those of other beings. We relate to each other more because we know each other more; in that knowing, we understand that we need each other more.
I almost forgot to complete the circle. Before that rosy, embedded knowing, there’s the struggle mentioned above. Here’s the burdensome reality à la Aldo Leopold, patron saint of Northern ecology and environmental ethics:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” (A Sand County Almanac)
Once the causes and the effects are made visible, hallmark to striving to belong to a place, you’ll find yourself at a crossroads. You can grow calloused and ignore the writing on the wall, or accept the vulnerable role of reluctant prophet.
In this sense, there’s an element of voluntary accounting to embeddedness. By that, I mean consideration of all things even when it isn’t convenient, and it’s not forced upon you. Enjoying the comfort of omission, the illusion of impenetrable distance between shaper and shaped, is easier. Think of terms like embedded costs or embedded energy. If you can see the whole deal, including the things that are often hidden (by no accident) there’s an ethical compulsion to live and behave accordingly. That’s the humbling path towards better relations with all things.
Fortunately, none of us are cast (or should be, at least) in any singular role, whether that of hardened overlooker or mender of all things. Every decision, choice, and interaction we’re involved in carries the potential for renewal. We live in a world verdant with opportunity, rife with ways to heal.
Someday, I’ll probably attempt to push the paradigm of embeddedness and generational commitment to place on my kids. I can see their response now.
“But what about the rest of the world?”
Does saying “yes” to a place, pursuing embeddedness, equate to parochialism — saying “no” to all others? If I intend to relate well to whatever community I’m in, does that mean casting a blind eye to whatever else is happening worldwide? What are the invisible borders of care? What if other places are just as deserving? Other people? And what if I need these other places and other people?
Those are all good and fair questions.
It’s my understanding that embeddedness scales. It relates to how I relate to this place, I’ve spelled that out. But it also concerns how this place relates to the wider world. So what does that look like in the real world? We’ll cover that next in Embeddedness, Part Two — Gaza, Limits, and Giving Up.
