Elizabeth Roy - Can Humans Grow Roots?

While reading The Ecology of Eden and working on our group presentation, I have been most influenced by what is actually a rather small part of one of our chapters: in just a little over three pages in Reclaiming Arcadia, Eisenberg talks about whether or not we really can or are meant to grow roots and stay in one place. Unlike some other things in this class, this didn’t immediately speak to me. My reaction was “of course we belong to a specific place, we’re not meant to be nomadic” and I moved on. But later I started thinking about it. Eisenberg notes that even our gardens are nomadic in nature – they’re meant to be walked in. Maybe not all of us have the need to be nomadic, but I think a lot of us do. In particular, we all love to go on vacations. From my daily personal experience, the need to be nomadic is also apparent. When I go to the park, I’m not at all interested in just sitting there; I want to walk on the trails. But more so than that, I want to move to a different ‘place’ mentally and emotionally. Eisenberg doesn’t explore this in depth, but I wonder if our urge to be nomadic, to move and see different places, is perhaps partly satisfied now by the world coming to our door in some ways. I don’t think that it’s sufficient, but maybe some people fulfill their urges to experience new settings through T.V. or the internet. Shows like Planet Earth and channels like Discovery are hugely possible – can this be part of the reason? If it is, I still don’t think it’s good enough to satisfy our nomadic souls. It’s akin to memorizing class material instead of actually understanding the concepts. On the surface it might seem adequate, but it’s not really. I think we actually need to physically interact with new places and experience new settings.