Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Place as Both Local and Boundary-less: The Puget Sound Commercial Geoduck Industry as an Example
Marion Dumont
Dumont lives on Carr Inlet near Gig Harbor, Washington. The beach near her home hosts a viable population of geoduck (pronounced GWEE-duk)—a large clam whose siphons can be seen protruding from the sand during seasonal low tides. She is currently enrolled at San Francisco’s California Institute of Integral Studies in their Humanities Ph.D program in Philosophy and Religion with a concentration in Women’s Spirituality. This essay is based on Dumont’s master’s thesis, “The history and development of the Puget Sound commercial geoduck industry: how does place shape the way in which we look at the history and development of the commercial geoduck industry?” University of Washington, 2004. mgdumont68@hotmail.com. © 2005 Marion Dumont.
Panopea abrupta is a very large clam commonly known in the Pacific Northwest as the geoduck (Gordon 1996). If you live in the Puget Sound region, there is nothing quite so fascinating as this great clam, which I became acquainted with the summer before starting my second year of graduate school. A study of the geoduck industry led me into the culture, politics, economics, history and ecology of the region. It was the notion of place that provided the perspective from which to weave my discoveries.
In this essay, I consider the emergence of non-local or boundary-less place and the interface that occurs between the local and non-local through an analysis of the history and development of the geoduck industry.
A Set of Living Relationships
A particularly useful way of looking at place is as a matrix of life-giving relationships. As René Dubos (1972) explains, “Each particular place is the continuously evolving expression of a highly complex set of forces—inanimate and living—which become integrated into an organic whole.”
From this perspective, one can argue that the geoduck, the Puget Sound region, and the commercial geoduck industry can be understood as a set of living relationships that constitute place. Place, Dubos goes on to say, “symbolizes the living ecological relationship between a particular location and the persons who have derived from it and added to it the various aspects of their humanness.” The Puget Sound marine ecosystem as a matrix of life-giving relationships is one real-world example of such a place.
In this sense, place is an evolution of a set of relationships between the living and the non-living that results in an organic whole. If we accept this description, what is place if not a system? Dempster’s depiction of a system is useful here: “Although a focus on components and boundaries is typical when identifying or understanding systems, the relations among these components are critical for establishing a system, its behaviour, and its degree of complexity” (Dempster 1998).
Everything about the geoduck is structured in relation to its environment—the Puget Sound marine ecosystem. Embedded in the Sound’s sea floor, the geoduck varies by size, color, and flesh according to the type of sediment into which it burrows.
In other words, the geoduck’s size, strength, composition and mobility are very much dependent on environmental surroundings, and its stupendous siphon, outsized fleshy body, and mammoth bivalves make no sense apart from the watery environment of Puget Sound. The relationships between the shell, the siphon, the foot, the soft body, and other components constitute the pattern of organization that is the geoduck.
Non-Local Place
Especially in modern times, however, human beings have coevolved in a relational system that includes but transcends local phenomena. Place becomes a system of life-supporting relationships that includes local and non-local factors.
Murray Bookchin (2001) explains that “…nature and society are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or human nature.” His biotic nature refers to local place—i.e., that space defined by an intimate, harmonious relationship between the natural world and early human beings. On the other hand, his human nature refers to non-local place—i.e., that space defined by boundary-less relationships between human beings and the world.
The notion of non-local place provides one way to understand the situation today in which many people have lost their place in the world. Our way of making a living is no longer shaped by local phenomena, which have retained only residual meaning. Instead, the local factors of nature, culture, and history have combined with non-local factors as determinants of place.
We no longer inhabit the local in the way in which indigenous people did. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the foods we eat all come from non-local places. When we eat clams or mussels, the shells are waste rather than a valuable exchange for goods or decorations for clothing.
Geoduck Industry as Non-Local
In studying the geoduck industry, it becomes evident that place is both a bounded local, regional space as well as a boundary-less set of relationships that transcend space and time. The geoduck has evolved with place, reproducing under a set of local and fairly controlled set of factors relatively easy to understand.
The geoduck industry, on the other hand, has emerged from the same place, but the character of its emergence is driven by non-local and unpredictable factors much more complicated and more difficult to decipher.
Today’s phenomenal market demand for geoduck is something no one could have predicted a century ago. The continued viability of this industry is dependent on its ability to transcend local boundaries and to create a complex system of global interdependency.
For example, thousands of miles from Puget Sound, boats full of geoduck wait to unload at Asian fish markets. The industry is structured around the individual and social preferences of a people that live on the other side of the world who adhere to a set of beliefs that serve these preferences. In short, the geoduck industry is very much shaped by the social preferences of cultures whose historical development has no local connections with the geoduck.
The geoduck industry as a way of making a living has evolved over a long history of non-native natural-resource use and has emerged as a system dependent on a market economy driven by the need for profit.
At the same time, however, the organization of the industry and the decisions made internally are not often in response to local phenomena. The geoduck industry is a viable market economy because of its structural relationship with non-local markets and has little to do with the set of relations that constitute local place.
Losing Life-Giving Relationships
The intersection of the bounded and the unbounded, represented here by the geoduck and the geoduck industry, is a new and troubling phenomenon. There is good reason to be concerned that local place has lost much of its value and that local characteristics such as the ecological diversity of the Pacific Northwest have only residual meaning and significance. It matters to the Puget Sound and it matters to the geoduck. It ought to matter to local people because they too belong to this place.
What have we lost as a result of our overwhelming accomplishments in overcoming the constraints of local place? Many would argue that we have lost the connections with local, life-giving relationships. We live as if these connections didn’t matter. But if the essence of place is relationships, what about humanity’s relationship with the creatures it exploits? What about the local inhabitants’ relationship with the local place in which they live?
Non-local places are dependent on a market paradigm driven by individual, social and market preferences and not by a creature or ecosystem’s well-being. The life economy of the marine ecosystem has its account-balancing activities that function to maintain its own viability. The very different economic and account-balancing activities of the geoduck industry function to maintain the viability of a market system. The local is everything for the former, but it has become residual to the latter. The contemporary interface between these two very different systems is not compatible with the life-giving relationships of the local place.
For both systems to survive there needs to be some sort of life-giving relationship that connects them. We are faced with the challenge of finding a way to restore balance and harmony to the structural relationships that define humanity’s place in the world. We must learn to respond in ways that are suitable to the environment that we inhabit.
Is it possible to structure our lives, not in response to a market economy, but in response to a market economy dependent on the natural world? Can we redefine profit margins to include environmental losses? Can we incorporate into our relationships with culture, politics, and economics a life-sustaining relationship with the natural world? Ultimately, the local is fundamental. Without the geoduck there would be no geoduck industry.
The problems that arise out of the intersection of place require more than finding fixes. Solving these problems will take a re-visioning of the way in which we inhabit our new kind of place. We need to manifest a way of living where two places can exist along side one another and the overlapping of shared factors can foster life-giving relationships. We need a new way of being in the world that enables us to be attentive to both the local and non-local aspects of our lives. We need to develop a view of the world not yet imagined.
References
Bookchin, Murray (2001). What Is Social Ecology? In Zimmerman, Michael E., Callicott J. Baird, Sessions, George, Warren, Karen J., and Clark, John (Eds.), Environmental Philosophy, From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (third ed., pp. 436-454). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Dubos, René (1972). A God Within. NY: Harper & Row.
Dempster, Beth L. (1998). A Self-Organizing Systems Perspective on Planning For Sustainability. Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Gordon, David George (1996). People for Puget Sound, Field Guide to the Geoduck. Seattle: Sasquatch Books.
Lippard, Lucy (1997). The Lure of the Local, Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. NY: New York Press.
Malpas, J.E. (1999). Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.
Norgaard, Richard, (1994). Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future. NY: Routledge.
Stein, Julie K. (2000). Exploring Coast Salish Prehistory, the Archaeology of San Juan Island. Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle: University of Washington Press.