Our ‘Place Attachment’ is Part of the Adaptation Problem
(Photo credit: Dean Moriarty, Creative Commons)
Place Attachment is a well-recognized concept in psychology. Basically it says that besides getting attached to people, we humans can become attached to places, with substantial emotional effect. Normally place attachment is not a problem. It is a problem with rising sea level. Part of the reason we resist planning for the abandonment of coastal locations is that emotional attachment to places that we love, even beyond their economic value.
During this holiday time of year many people go back to places that are important to them. Places with family memories. Perhaps places where they grew up. Whether one grew up in Miami Beach or spent summers on the New Jersey shore, or any other low-lying coastal area, they can represent a sense of “home”, with strong emotional connections for us.
Of course, there are some people who can’t wait to move elsewhere in the world. Some even relocate repeatedly during their lives. For some of them, it may be that their birthplace has negative associations. Many leave northern areas to move to better weather and better year round sunshine.
Yet as they got older, even many of those “wanderers” return home. In some cases it’s to be with aging parents, but for others it is simply to reconnect with their roots. I lived in the Bahamas for a good period of my life. They have a saying, that one returns to their navel string, illustrating another cultural aspect of place attachment. In native communities, there was a custom when someone was born, to bury the umbilical cord, or “navel string” near the home. In Jamaica, I understand the custom is also to plant a tree at that site. With variations in many different Caribbean cultures, it symbolizes the point that we have roots in a place. I know from talking to several of my Bahamian friends who lived in the “big cities” of Freeport and Nassau, that upon retirement, many of them planned to return to the smaller island community where they were born.
And it is not just humans that have this programming. From sea turtles to salmon, many species travel far during their life’s journey, yet return to give birth or to die, in the same place they were born.
Place attachment is powerful. I saw this recently when a person I know well, who is part of the engineering community working on sea level rise adaptation, was on television and was asked about the future of their city, Miami. Wistfully they said they believed we will find a solution, that America and the World will not let Miami go underwater. I think I clenched my teeth when I heard that, as I have discussed this with them privately. They really have no case as to how or why Miami will not go underwater. Yet, they do not want to accept reality about the coastal community that we see today.
Dreams, beliefs and positive attitude are really powerful and important. But even the US Congress does not get to rewrite the laws of physics.
The reality is that the ice is melting faster and faster, and the water is rising. Sea level has now passed a tipping point. It will continue to rise for centuries. If we fully commit to using our intellect to stop global warming we can slow the rate of rise, eventually limiting it to perhaps ten or twenty feet. In that way, our place attachment can spur the needed effort to slow the warming.
It is time to evolve as a species. Letting go of our place attachment will be part of that as we now face the new choices. The positive side is this deep desire not to give up place, can be a driving force for us to begin bold adaptation measures to “save” our coastal cities. With ingenuity, there may be a few coastal places that we can save with planning, engineering and architecture.
In lots of other places we will simply have to move to higher ground. I think it may take a generation, 20 – 30 years, for us to embrace this adaptation. Individually, in our communities, and as a society, we are going to have to go through some tough personal challenges to deal with this loss of place.
Some of you will be visiting places of attachment over the holidays. Perhaps this is a good time to ponder how we will communicate, educate, and adapt as the sea rises, changing coastlines, putting lots of precious land and memories underwater. We will have coastal cities in the future. But they will be different. In fact, with really bold vision, there could well be a vibrant new community, a new Miami. Miami is used here as the archetype. There are hundreds of large coastal cities and perhaps ten thousand smaller coastal communities “in the same boat.”
The good news is that we have decades to plan and effect the adaptation. We have time, but we have no time to waste.
For the sake of future generations, we need to get past our “loss” and begin planning for the rising tide. We can and will adapt. In fact, we have no choice.