Thinking about Geography and Community
  Wendell Berry in Decolonizing Rural America Audubon March/April 1993
Excerpts and reflections.

The true source and analogue of our economic life is the economy of plants, which never exceeds natural limits, never grows beyond the power of its place to support it, produces no waste, and enriches and preserves itself by death and decay. We must learn to grow like a tree and not like a fire. We must repudiate what Edward Abbey called the ideology of the cancer cell---the idiotic ideology of unlimited economic growth that pushes blindly toward the limitation of massive catastrophe.

But if we speak of a healthy community, we cannot be speaking of a community that is merely human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans in a place plus the place itself: its soil, its water, its air , and all the families and tribes of the nonhuman creatures that belong to it. If the place is well preserved; if its entire membership, natural and human. is present in it; and if the human economy is in practical harmony with the nature of the place, then the community is healthy. A diseased community will suffer natural losses that become, in turn , human losses. A good community is sustainable , it is within reasonable limits self sufficient, and it is within reasonable limits self-determining-- that is free of tyranny. It is even conceivable that our people in Washington D.C. might make decisions turning towards sustainability and self-sufficiency in local economies. The federal government could do much to help, if it would. Its mere acknowledgment that problems exist would be a promising start.  
Barry Lopez in Losing Our Sense Of Place Teacher Magazine February 1990
Excerpts and reflections.

Americans are fast becoming strangers in a strange land, where one roiling river, one patch of desert is as good as another. America the beautiful exists---a select few still know it intimately---but many of us are settling for a homogenized national geography.

To truly understand geography requires not only time but a kind of local expertise, an intimacy that few of us ever develop.

A specific geographical understanding, however, can be sought out and borrowed. It resides with men and women more or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and history, for the turn of leaves and night sounds. Often they will take an outlander in tow.
Their knowledge is intimate rather than encyclopedic, human but not necessarily scholarly. It rings with the concrete details of experience.

America, I believe teems with such people. The paradox here between a faulty grasp of geographical knowledge for which Americans are indicted and the intimate, apparently contradictory familiarity of a group of largely anonymous people, is not solely a matter of confused scale.(The local landscape is easier to know than a national geography.)And it is not simply ironic. The paradox is dark. To be succinct. The politics and advertising that seek a national audience must project a national geography; to be broadly useful that geography, must inevitably, be generalized and it is often romantic. It is therefore frequently misleading and imprecise. The same holds true with the entertainment industry, but here the problem might be clearer. The same films, magazines and television features that honor an imaginary American landscape also tout the worth of the anonymous men and women who interpret it . Their affinity for the land is lauded, their local allegiance admired. But the rigor of their local geographies, taken as a whole, contradicts a patriotic, national vision of unspoiled, untroubled land. These men and women are ultimately forgotten along with the details of the landscapes they speak for, in the face of more pressing national matters. It is the chilling nature of modern society to find an ignorance of geography, local or national, as excusable as an ignorance of hand tools; and to find the commitment of people to their home places only momentarily entertaining. And finally naive.

In 40,0000 years of human history, it has only been in the last few hundred years or so that a people could afford to ignore their local geographies as completely as we do and survive.

Technological innovations from refrigerated trucks to artificial fertilizers, from sophisticated cost accounting to mass air transportation, have utterly changed concepts of season, distance, soil productivity, and the real cost of drawing sustenance from the land.