Where your mind formed...
The place you were born and raised is where your mind formed, and it fundamentally shapes what you manifest everywhere you go.
Does the place you’re born and raised shape the way you perceive and interact with the world? Is there more to “place” than the people, what some call “the culture,” and other human cultural objects, such as food, clothing and religion? If so, that missing piece is probably the environment – which is where things get complicated.
Everyone seems to think they know what the environment is, where it is, and how it affects them – where nature and wilderness are, where the indoors and outdoors are – but I would venture that most couldn’t articulate these concepts with any sophistication, and you would likely find that all answers are cultural. I would also bet that few to none could articulate how their surroundings shaped the way they view the world.
Let’s say that your surroundings do shape the way you view and interact with the world; Everything from the way you view indoors vs. outdoors, what tastes good, what’s pretty, where danger and safety are; Where nature is, what it is, or if it matters; Your concept of wilderness, and whether you’re even aware of wildness; What smells are normal, good, or known to be hazardous; What kinds of surfaces the world can or should have, the directions you can walk and move, what animals you know the names of and which are exotic, and so on. The list of how your surroundings during formation and maintenance of your mind is extensive.
I think this is worth exploring because of the way, and for the reasons, people are moving to the West in droves. When I say droves, I mean the exponential growth pattern that is shifting the center-point of population in the U.S., and converting most of the landscape of the West to something that looks more familiar to the people migrating.
As the prairies, deserts, and mountainous environments of the west are scraped and replaced with a built environment and biota that directly resembles western European and eastern American landscapes, it seems like something worthy of explanation.
If you walk through any city along the Front Range of Colorado, you’ll notice a couple things – Kentucky bluegrass, deciduous trees (all of which are not native to the location), and construction of houses and buildings that are no different from any found in any state in the U.S., and that are fundamentally juxtaposed to the environmental realities of living in this region.
The conversion of the West’s landscapes into something else tells us something about the people moving here, and it’s counter to their conscious, declared, and virtue-centered reasons for moving here.
The only way to explain what’s happening across the West, in the conversion of all of the places to a built environment that looks homogeneous to the rest of the country and western European world is that the people moving are shaped by something they do not know how to live without. They manifest the familiar wherever they go, and the familiar happens to include Kentucky bluegrass lawns, rectangle shaped properties, deciduous, eastern American trees, and all the accouterments of a very specific kind of domestic jungle.
An inescapable oddity is how different the environment of the West is from the built environment that every person moving comes with and creates demand for.
The West, perhaps especially the interior West, is built to burn. It’s built to flood. It’s built to be dry as hell. It’s built to be super cold, then super hot, sometimes in the same day. And it’s built to do these things constantly.
In context of Colorado, the places being converted into urban and suburban domestic jungles are not built to support trees - the winds and soils never supported them naturally. The high plains are naturally a dry prairie environment with open range and extremely sparsely placed trees. The mountains and plains are built to burn every 2-5 years, and very rarely to have soil-sterilizing crown fires (most / all of our fires now). If you stop watering Kentucky bluegrass in Colorado, it dies – and it dies completely – because there is nothing in this environment that can sustain this grass type without human help and infrastructure to deliver water.
What I’m pointing to here is this; The West is being converted into something it’s not, and it’s being converted by a group of people who aren’t from here, and that conversion is driven by something that goes entirely unrecognized — our manifestation the familiar wherever we go by creating demand for it.
There’s an author who explored this concept many years ago, hilariously in context of the ecological conversion that happened across New England and the Midwest over the last couple centuries. If I recall correctly (yeah, this isn’t an academic journal, so I’m pulling this all from memory), the author’s name was Carolyn Merchant, and she called this a “natureculture.”
Let’s use that for a minute. She jammed two words together that don’t often go together to understand something – how the world around you (nature) shapes your identity and the identities of everyone around you to be basically similar (culture). And how your culture fundamentally shapes the way you interact with and perceive everything around you.
If we apply that to the context of mass migrations, like we’re seeing to the American West right now, we might arrive at a conclusion that the natureculture of the individuals migrating is fundamentally different from both the people acculturated to this place and its environment. Evidence for this would be the fact that none of those migrating move into the environment in a way that leaves it mostly the same - and the ecosystems mostly functioning - instead, scraping all of it and putting something entirely new and different in.
The real rub is when you hear why people are moving West and to places like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and so on – It’s always to get closer to nature, to respond to the mountains that called them, and to be more “outdoorsy.” The great irony is all of these virtue-rooted statements, personally declared identity veneers, followed by total and utter conversion of the place into the same place they came from.
Convinced yet that the ‘natureculture’ concept might explain much of what we’re seeing? I find the sudden and mass migration to the West, abandonment of the expired landscapes of the eastern U.S., and wholesale conversion of the West to those familiar spaces to be compelling evidence for the presence of an unrecognized mechanism in the development of our minds and identities.
So, are we shaped by the places around us? It’s a rhetorical question worth pondering. Does someone who grows up in Manhattan, New York have a different perception of the world than someone from Truckee, California, or Ault, Colorado? I think the answer is yes – and I bet it touches everything from the way they view the mountains, to the way they feel in cities, to the way they understand risk or money, and perhaps even in what tastes good. And in the case of this informal analysis – it probably fundamentally shapes what elements of the environment they live in feel okay, normal, safe or unsafe, or what their perception and approach to the domestic and non-domestic environments are.
When you hear about people moving West, or heck, moving just slightly east (looking at you, Californians), just know that they’re shaped by something that is likely to be manifested wherever they go – something familiar to them, which was planted there without their knowledge, simply by the natural formation of their minds in the place they were raised and the kinds of places they lived the longest. Maybe there’s something to that natureculture concept.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted westerner who is actively watching its wholesale conversion from one ecology to something completely different, and is compelled to shout about it into this dark, vacuous corner of the internet.