Thinking about Perspective

It’s right there in the word itself: “perspective” speaks of the place you see from, more than what you’re looking at. But as we throw the term around—“from my perspective, that’s not a good decision,” etc—I think we tend to forget the geographic specificness wrapped up inside it. We make it out to be a trait of an individual, rather than something gained from a place.

Let me tell you something I’ve realized here, at the end of the earth: much wisdom lies right there in the original sense of the word. Plopping myself down in the midst of rainy virgin forests, endless waterfalls, and vast low-tide mudflats clearly shapes the way I look out at the rest of the big ol’ world. For one thing, despite many summers of wilderness adventure, I’ve never experienced a truly rural existence, where getting groceries becomes a production, international news filters in slowly—and seems quasi-irrelevant, and the scarcity of companions encourages you to befriend everyone, including the dogs.

Of course, many have preceded me in this epically obvious recognition. A “worldview” comes from where you view the world, not just from positions read in books or digested through family. You could probably trace the roots of this understanding of perspective back to any number of philosophical schools of thought. Perhaps this would be an interesting exercise for a rainy day.

Nonetheless, I’m appreciating the visceral experience of perspective I’ve had over the past, say, month. Leaving to travel in the north of Chile only sharpened my appreciation for how just living in this place has made its mark on my thinking. As we hopped about the lancha to cruise up toward town, my appreciation for the place I now call "home" began to sink in: not only do I wake up to a volcano out my window, but I'm slowly seeing the world around me with new eyes.

Never before have I felt the lens of place so strongly—meaning that I can recognize how the very peculiar life I’m living inspires a particular understanding of the world, its problems, history, future and the like. I've learned to recognize erosion scars, decades-old signs of slash-and-burn clearing, and the marks of overgrazing. When I tromp down to the ocean with my sea-kayak perched on my head—the best method, I’ve discovered, to approach the deceptively long walk to the water—and set myself afloat in the deserted fjord, wildness, in as immediate and powerful sense as Thoreau must have envisioned, seeps into my daily routine. I wonder, how will I return to a life without sea lions popping their sleek dark heads out of waves to make oddly human snorts and grunts? To a world where natural beauty remains in small-scale—in lichen on rocks and veins on leaves—but has disappeared as an all-encompassing phenomenon?

Moreover, how will it shape our history that most people will never comprehend such wildness—because they will never come to a place where dolphins and sea lions find them not out of training, or the hope for a snack, but out of curiosity and interest at their unusual presence? I wonder this while acknowledging the privilege and luck that has brought me here, not criticizing but rather marveling at how belonging to this place, at least for now, naturally inspires a system of value completely different from that of, say, NYC.

Sitting in a cubicle in New York or a dining hall in Cambridge, one can easily scoff, "Saving the dolphins? That's so quaint--what I care about is people." There's nothing wrong with that: if surrounded by millions of people, the empathetic thinking person is bound to prioritize environmental action along these lines. Most days here in south Chile, however, I see more dolphins than people--this is not a joke--which transforms my perception of campaigns to preserve biodiversity. Like many environmentalists of my generation, I enjoy making fun of the cutesy pleas on behalf of charismatic macrofauna, which seem directed exclusively to little old ladies and children who still read Ranger Rick. But this year has pushed me to see the larger story behind these efforts.

Without urging myself toward a pre-established philosophy, I’ve found radical ecological visions more palatable (and plausible) than before—for instance, the impossibility of consumerism here (as in, there is nothing to buy!) has proven refreshing, not oppressive. A perfect utopia Reñihue is not: even if the whole world could transform itself to this system of operation, problems would remain. The importance of living here for me, I think, lies in the power of suggestion, in that seeing the world from this angle, through this lens, alters the contours of the possible and shifts the balance of worth.

Having LG, my dear former roommate, visit Pumalin solidified for me the mind-changing potential of this place: after just a few days, she marveled at how seeing this alternative system of farming and living with nature transforms one’s conception of environmentalism. Instead of an urban-crunch movement about recycling and graphs of CO2 concentrations, the environmental worldview here weaves itself into the pattern of daily life in ways that have to be experienced, not just described. The gap between talk and action is huge, but here I see that the chasm between ideas and a way of life can be even bigger—and that getting a sense of the latter can be tremendously influential. Reading, of course, provides a crucial element of rigorous thought, reasoned out and organized, which experience leads you to agree with but not necessarily state so clearly.

So where does this little musing on perspective lead me? Well, back to the hope of finding a way to bring more people like me down here to see this place for themselves. Spending enough time here to think from this place, not just about it, educates insidiously and profoundly. Instead of talking at people so much, maybe we need to do more to introduce people to the places we'd like them to think from. At the same time, I’m realizing how bringing a way of life, a place, into existence can represent as mind-changing an act as writing a treatise. Creating a place to see from, even if it’s as small as a home or a spot in the woods—perhaps itself a work of philosophy?