On June 22, 2024, Vic Thasiah, RPL’s board president, talked about the importance of a sense of place for environmental advocacy around the campfire at RPL’s Leadville, Colorado, Camp and Run. He answers a few heady follow-up questions attendees had below.
Love is at the heart of Runners for Public Lands. What does this mean to you?
Vic: I don’t fish, farm, ranch, hunt, or gather for a living, so like many people today I was pretty disconnected from the natural world, taking lots of things for granted. My primary way of reconnecting has been through running public lands and urban paths—so, aesthetically (through beauty and wonder) and recreationally. Simply put, RPL is like a school of love to me, training in, as Pittsburgh poet Cole Arthur Riley explains, loving some place and people well enough that you can mourn well the harms they undergo, work like hell to protect them, and in the meantime delight like a child in this beautiful world.*
How does this love translate into runners doing environmental advocacy?
Vic: Outdoor recreation is often positively associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, with small to moderate effects.** Direct sensory contact with living organisms (flora and fauna) and physical landscapes (rocks and paths, mountains and valleys, rivers and streams), including the atmosphere (the sun, moon, and stars, and the winds and clouds), combined with our emotional attachments to such experiences is the deciding factor. Based on what I’ve seen at RPL, layering in a sense of place with our running—which enhances our engagement with nature, and informs and inspires a stronger emotional bond with it—further engrains pro-environmental values and actions, resulting in the protection of nature near and far.
On a related matter, nothing enhances my own engagement with life more than when I see someone in my family dusting off our exquisite, ice-blue-glass cake stand. Guaranteed, it means a layer cake and celebration are in the works. The three tiers of a layer cake provide an easy way of visualizing how runner advocacy stacks up. The bottom tier, layer one, is running wild—running natural landscapes from the minimal, manicured, and fragmented (like in many city centers) to the vast, wild, and encompassing (like in many public lands). The middle tier, layer two, is a sense of place, the emotional attachment one has to a particular environment. And the top tier, layer three, is the ensuing pro-environmentalism.
How would you define “a sense of place,” the middle tier of the layer cake?
Vic: A sense of place is both the emotional attachment we experience and emotional bond we create with particular environments (physical features and living organisms) based on our own cultural backgrounds and/or personal perspectives—which can be combined with any or all of the following relevant to the respective environment: natural histories, Native histories, settler histories, and contemporary ecological and/or social issues. Of course, such a sense of place isn’t necessarily always a positive feeling. For many, certain environments are connected, for example, to experiences of violence, injustice, trauma, and fear. There’s also the feeling of “placelessness,” where the market forces of homogenization and standardization gradually efface distinctive and characteristic regional and local differences.*** A sense of place can also be linked to our related senses of obligation, community, and identity.
Given RPL’s national advocacy agenda, how does deepening our sense of place where we live and run relate to protecting environments elsewhere?
Vic: Since everything is connected, from our food and clothing to our phones and climates, there really isn’t an “elsewhere” anymore. I like how a French philosopher once put it when he recommended that in addition to reflecting on the land we live on, we should reflect on the land we live from.**** In other words, how would we map the reach of our lives based on the far-flung lands that produce everything we have and consume, and receive everything we eventually no longer want and throw out? “Where” exactly do we live then? Everywhere? So, advocating for national and global environmental protection is a just, practical, and effective way to protect both the lands we live on and those we live from.
Footnotes:
*Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh (Convergent, 2022).
**Masashi Soga and Kevin J. Gaston, “Do people who experience more nature act more to protect it? A meta-analysis,” Biological Conservation 289 (January 2024).
***K.E. Foote and M. Azaryahu, “Sense of Place,” International Encyclopedia of Human Georgraphy 10 (2009) 96-100.
****Bruno Latour, “Introduction,” in Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (The MIT Press, 2020).