Most Promising Paradigm: Whole Place

Place meant something to most people in the year 1000 and something quite different to most people in the year 2000. A fundamental and very useful understanding of the shift arises from a review of humans' responses to gravity, the long inescapable force that, for example,

Steady developments in mobility and message delivery important for campaigns of aggression reduced ancient gravity-induced frustrations (i.e., flattened the human environment) and were principal drivers of the great shift. The shift replaced the locale (area physically and meaningfully accessible via self- and animal-propulsion) with individual takes on all – real, historical and imagined – the planet has to offer. Generally speaking, places inhabited are now effectively private constructions, not the natural and historic givens incorporating biotic, abiotic and built elements. It's not that that they exist no longer; they are damaged, ignored and mysterious. Few people are acquainted with and truly understanding of them.

Prior to the shift, nearly all places were whole, or tending toward wholeness, because humans did not have the means and did not generate the intensity required for consequential damage. Life processes of production, consumption and decomposition were able to make way for more lives, as always. There were exceptions; people did overdo it here and there, and from those places people moved to unspoiled places for fresh starts, establishing a pattern that cannot continue because people are everywhere. The unprecedented lack of physical frontiers defines this moment; it's time to attend to damaged and ignored places, to begin healing them all.

As never before, we need grounded generalists in all ecosystems, beginning with uplands and degraded lands. To thwart erosion and desertification, and to provide the most nourishing foods, life must be restored to soils and penetration of water into the ground must be ensured. However, the great shift also pushed the grounded generalist toward extinction, while prizing rapid evolution of technical specializations. Powered by cheap fossil fuels and other capital-intensive forms of energy, this process enabled and encouraged unprecedented billions of people to live in unwhole places, vulnerably reliant upon artificial and unsustainable systems. Each day, these billions go about their activities under the spell that today will be quite like yesterday, except that some new product or service (both broadly defined) may be in the marketplace.

Rampant specialization in vocations and disciplines, coupled with the mentality associated with the consumer/end-user role, means that too few know what works sustainably, both in locales and overall. Each day is an act of blind faith in a combination of what worked, what's being introduced and what will be introduced. The blind faith in global systems must give way to confidence in knowable and locally adjustable systems – whole places – that affirm and enhance life.