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maybe everyone is right?

jo's picture

As much as I loved bell hooks' way of thinking about home and culture of belonging, it was somewhat comforting to see that people like Morton do not necessarily agree with that view of home/place - and it was also very confusing. For while I haven't experienced a culture of belonging first-hand, I want to believe such a thing is possible, and attainable for me. And at the same time, I am conscious of the very legitimate points made by Martin and Mohanty, who (from what I could gather from their complex language and sentence structures) argue that any community of sameness and comfort inherently shuts out others and makes oppression possible. Which sucks (to put it more bluntly). I can only assume that more oppression (akin to the Ku Klux Klan) is the last thing bell hooks would want, so how can I reconcile both of these ideas? And how does Morton's fit in, his criticism of "fixation on a place"? Maybe all that matters (to me) is how each of these arguments fits into my own understanding of home, place, and community as these things relate to environmentalism/social justice. For example, a community that is actively working to fight oppression might, on the way, exclude some voices, but if they are working hard to be anti-opressive (which, honestly many enviro-justice communities aren't, or think they are but get criticized for not doing enough) and simultaneously trying to end oppression of certain groups of people and/or the environment, maybe that's ok. And if an individual living in Appalachia is able to put their whole life into fighting mountaintop removal because of their sense of belonging to the mountains, their sense of place, than maybe that is an example of the ecological thought moving through them.

Comments

Bob Zwilling's picture

maybe everyone is right?

When living in the event horizon of a big mud hole with humans who over the years have repeatedly put Earth at the center of the solar system, a more likely scenario would be nobody's right when everybody's wrong. Stephen Stills originally gave some people the benefit of the doubt, but I would say we have moved to the point where no one understands what is going down.