Wallace Stegner made a distinction between those who settled in a place and tended to it and those who were more migratory — people who used a place for its resources and then moved on. This is from his essay “A Sense of Place”:
The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that it wasn’t created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what the members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.
My sense of place is like that — and my approach to writing about a place is like that: note by note, collected over many seasons in different kinds of weather.
• Source: I found parts of Wallace Stegner’s “A Sense of Place” here:
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