Decades before I became a therapist, I had aspirations of being a city planner for the City of Duluth in Minnesota. I had previously interned in the planning department as an urban and regional studies (URS) major. Duluth was like a life-sized erector and train set scaled-up from the one I had as a boy. This was my dream career but fate would make it my holy grail.
I graduated and after six years of living as an indigent student, my father didn't have to try hard to convince me to return home to decompress, rake-in some easy cash from the summertime economy at the (New) Jersey Shore and then embark on a career back in Duluth.
It sounded good but as I would discover a long-distance job search for public sector employment in a city undergoing an economic shakedown would be a fool's errand. That was 1988 and there was no internet.
It would be a good year or so before I landed a graduate level job in digital cartography for a map maker and publisher in New Jersey. I committed to two years, enough experience to become proficient in geographic info systems (GIS), an attractive competency for a Planner 1.
How wrong I was to believe that my URS degree would get me into the job market!
You are probably wondering why I wasn't shopping the New Jersey job market for planner vacancies. Well, basically they didn't exist! That was another setback. Public planning jobs are political appointments and were scarce. Planning at the municipal level in New Jersey is a zoning exercise more than anything and outsourced to engineers who happen to be state licensed planners.
I was what you would call structurally un- or under-employed even though I was working full-time.
When I first got back to Monmouth County, I was aghast at how it had changed in just six years. Across New Jersey more land went under the bulldozer in the 1980s than in the 200-odd years since it was a British colony.
Monmouth County never had a rush hour before. The country lanes had become arterial roadways fed by tributary collector streets from sprawling housing developments. And where did all the farms and apple orchards go? Every woodland seemed to be for sale. Locals like me were outnumbered by an unstoppable tide of in-migrants from northern New Jersey and the outer boroughs of New York City.
Even my hometown felt less homespun. A reshuffle of the shops on our main street resulted in touristy businesses cashing-in on the cachet of Spring Lake in a reconstitution of the community from one that never advertised a house for sale and townspeople that never flaunted it even though they had it - to one that was tilting toward ostentation and false pretenses.
I felt like an alien. I was experiencing solastalgia.
One day I was driving
my VW Jetta with my beloved Greenland/Siberian husky dog in the back seat and I
pulled up to a red light. The car in front of me had a bumper sticker
that read – “The more people I meet the more I like my dog”.
That hit pretty close
to home.
As I waited for the
light to change I looked in my rear view mirror at Kodiak and then scanned the
view ahead. No shortage of motorists at the Exxon gas station on the
corner. And across the road another shopping center and housing
development was going up.
What is wrong with
this picture! The Garden State had become the strip mall dystopia.
Well for starters, the
animals have no voice and the wildlife that once inhabited that tract of land
were more or less massacred and nobody batted an eye. The Exxon Valdez
oil spill that devastated the ecology of Alaska’s Prince William Sound wasn’t
two years before. It was the biggest manmade environmental disaster to
date and was entirely avoidable.
There I was boycotting
Exxon for two years, a structurally unemployed urban planning graduate amid a
frenzy of urban sprawl that was inexorably and irrevocably destroying the
quality of life and changing the character of place from town and country to
exurbia.
My values seemed so
out of sync with the world that was buzzing all around me. I was suffering eco-grief and I was an insignificant minority interest. The introduction of the rat race had descended.
Subdivisions were carving-up the land into homogenzied zones that segregated and catalogued where to live, work and play that predictably determined where you were born and where you died and how you were going to drive between them.
Land use planning can have profound consequences on society. The Canadian prog-rock band Rush wrote the anthem to the suburban dream gone wrong. Subdivisions speaks to the urban planner in me and the non-conformist "dreamer" I was in high school.
Fast forward to
England a couple decades to the winter of 2018. The Beast from the East
pounded the North Sea coast where I live. I witnessed the near
disappearance of a local beach to erosion and the damage to the sand dune that
protected the littoral zone between the fields and the sea.
I went to see an
existential therapist to describe how emotionally impacted I was by this and he
discerningly inquired if I identified in some way with the sand dune.
I did. I felt
personally wounded as if I had merged with the sand dune and I felt emotional
pain in my heart. Over my lifetime I have felt close to nature but I had
never experienced such sensation with physical earth.
This was about the
time when the last living male northern white rhinoceros died. He had a
name and it was Sudan. I had become very affectionate for rhinos and
keenly aware of the insatiable demand for rhino horn by Chinese herbalists and
the consequential poaching of these magnificent, prehistoric creatures.
I linked their looming
extinction to that of my own. It was a sobering introspection. I was experiencing extinction anxiety.
The photojournalist
Ami Vitale covered the death of Sudan (National Geographic 2019). She
said it was like watching her own demise. After years of working in war
zones she had this to say about the human condition, “If you dig deep enough
behind virtually every human conflict, you will find an erosion of the bond
between humans and the natural world around them”.
References
1. Vitale, A.
2019. Lessons From the Last of His Kind. National Geographic
10.2019
2. Peart, Neil Elwood; Weinrib, Gary Lee; Zivojinovich, Alex, (1982), "Subdivisions", Ole Media Management.
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