Becoming Local

Pardon me, your privilege is showing

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future … Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.

Simone Weil, The Need For Roots (1943)

Local is a loaded term . Like expat it has picked up some exclusionary-bordering-on-nationalist assumptions and shadings that make it here in the 21st century a much different term than it was in the Friends of the Earth era.The best evidence points to David Brower coining the term Think Global, Act Local as a slogan for Friends of the Earth sometime in 1971. (Gianinazzi, Willy (2018). “Penser global, agir local. Histoire d’une idée”, EcoRev. Revue critique d’écologie politique, N. 46, Summer, p. 19-30.) Which is really unfortunate when we are entering a period of vastly changing fortunes for much of the world.

So perhaps I can avoid that freight that the term brings along and concentrate for a moment on what local really is - the feeling and experience of living together in a place with other people. There are local people, local customs, local foods, and local solutions to local problems.

Simone Weil says that a well-grounded human draws “the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.” There certainly have been some changes to daily life since 1943 when she wrote that, but not nearly as many as one might think at first.

Now, it is not hard to see how a exclusionary nativist can take those words, and the sentiments behind them, and twist them into something that says “if your ancestors are not from this place, then you do not belong here”. That of course is the meaning of the folksy saying “A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ‘em biscuits!”The earliest variation I can find attestation to is Daniel O’Connell, referring to the Duke of Wellington: “The poor old duke, what shall I say of him? To be sure he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse.”

But the inconvenient fact for all of these nativist (what a nice word for “xenophobic racist” that is, don’t you think?) reactionaries is that every day, all over the world, people become local. They settle in to a place, a milieu, that they did not originate from and they become part of the social, economic, physical, and moral fabric of the place.

I am always reminded of an exchange I once witnessed in an internet chat room between a resident of Berlin and an American whose grandparents had immigrated there from Germany. The Berliner, exasperated with the claiming of German-ness by the American based on nothing but some spurious sense of genetic ownership, put it bluntly.

“You don’t speak the language, you don’t live here, you don’t work here, you don’t know anyone here. You are not in any way German. Emir who lives in the apartment below me, runs a kebab stand by the park, sends his daughters to the same school as mine, and came here 25 years ago from Turkey - he is as German as I am.”