Finding Rootedness

Note: This print issue editorial was written in mid-February, before Russia invaded Ukraine. It has since taken on an added poignance. Our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine, including those who have lost their lives and the hundreds of thousands who have suddenly been made homeless.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit these days about our need for rootedness. For that sense of connection to our homelands, our ancestors, our cultures, and how that impacts the ways in which we interact with this world. This need crops up in several features in this issue where land is at stake.

In our cover story, “On the Edge,” we learn about a farmer in Germany who’s refusing to let his land be dug up for brown coal, not only because he thinks the compensation being offered by the mining company is inadequate or because of the climate impact of burning more of this highly polluting fuel, but also because he doesn’t think anything can compensate for the emotional impact of losing his fourth-generation family farm. “Standoff in Patagonia” shows how the Indigenous Mapuche people in Argentina are increasingly realizing that their struggle for cultural revival is deeply intertwined with the lands they lived on for thousands of years until they were displaced by European colonizers in the nineteenth century. And in “When Home Is On Fraying Land” we hear from the residents of Kenya’s Yala Swamp, some of whom are clinging to their homes even as the waters rise up around them.

Each of these features underscores for me what French philosopher Simone Weil wrote back in 1949: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Our failure to recognize and adequately value this deep yearning is probably why it has been relatively easy for corporations and countries to uproot people (albeit mostly the economically poor) and desecrate land for ages in the name of development. Thankfully, there’s been a growing recognition of this need in recent years, especially as land-back movements by Indigenous and other frontline communities across the world gain momentum.

But as an immigrant myself, I’ve also been wondering about what rootedness can mean in today’s hyper-mobile world, where the quest for everything from personal safety and freedom, to financial security, to love, has so many of us crisscrossing the globe and setting up homes in unfamiliar lands.

Way out there in space, the James Webb Space Telescope offers glimmerings of an answer. Launched in December and now parked about a million miles from Earth, this new telescope is designed to help scientists study the universe when the earliest stars and galaxies were emerging from what remained of the Big Bang some 200 million years ago. In other words, it will help us gain a better understanding of the “roots,” so to speak, of life itself on Earth.

If we ever needed a reminder that, in the end, our many branching roots go back to the same single source, there you have it.

Which makes me think, perhaps that sense of belonging we all seek can also come from this broader understanding of the entire planet as home, and from engaging with communities, human and nonhuman, wherever we are.