MAPPING THE SOUL OF THE LAND THE ECOPSYCHOLOGY OF PLACE Christopher Castle

Christopher Castle, the arts editor for Ecopsychology On-Line and former editor of the Ecopsychology Newsletter, is an English painter, printmaker, and icon-maker whose work is represented in several collections, including the British Museum. His interest in ecological and indigenous art has led him to study sacred sites across Europe and in the American southwest. He is also a composer who scores for the synthesizer from the computerized contours of landscape and of such natural objects as cellular forms, animal tracks, and stellar geometry. In 1997, he received a grant from the Marin County Arts Council to undertake the Marinography Mapping Project. Based upon the highly successful Common Ground Parish Maps Project in Great Britain, the Marinography Mapping Project is an extraordinary example of community-based art that expresses ecological values. Drawing upon oral history, local memory, personal stories, and indigenous lore collected from those who live in the area, the project seeks to configure a people's cultural heritage into a map -- in this case the people in and around West Marin County in California where Castle resides. As director of the project, Castle organizes focus groups made up of school children, merchants, farmers and ranchers, senior citizens, native Americans, and other residents who provide the raw material from which local artists will create a permanent work that is, in effect, an emotional map. Because the project weaves together an intimate knowledge of place with deep personal feeling, it is a significant application of ecopsychology.

In one of his whimsical stories, Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland, came up with a humorous paradox about maps. One of his characters asks, "What do you consider the largest map that would really be useful?"         "About six inches to the mile."         "Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on a scale of a mile to the mile!"         "Have you used it much?" I enquired.         "It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr; "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." From Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (The Man in the Moon)         But not even a map that was as big as the terrain itself would be able to capture the soul of the land. That requires a special kind of map. A community map.         I have designed the Marinography Mapping Project to involve the community of West Marin County, California, in the process of discovering the natural, social and cultural ecology of our area through art and communication. The project intends to give individual, local voices a chance to be heard telling their own stories of place through images, dreams, memories, anecdotes, current perceptions, and visions for the future of the land. In this sense a map of this kind is related to earlier forms of cartography in which subjective perceptions and objective observation are featured with equal weight.         The area we are mapping is quite special in its location and its unusual combination of features. Tomales Bay, a long narrow inlet defined by the San Andreas Fault, divides the mainland grassy hills of ranch land Marin County from the Point Reyes Peninsular, a roughly triangular form projecting into the Pacific and including forests of Bishop Pine on slopes going down to estuaries and sandy beaches. Flora, fauna, water and bird life abound.

This beautiful area is located within an hour's drive of San Francisco. Most of the land is preserved as Point Reyes National Seashore and provides a unique resource as a get-away for the metropolitan area of the San Francisco Bay Area. Point Reyes Station provides the principal locus for the development of the project, which reaches out to include the small towns of Inverness, Olema, and Marshall. Events and focus group meetings involving school children, seniors, farmers, and various experts on the human and natural history of the area are being held to encourage people to join the adventure, to exchange stories and to make our first pictures. "Stories" in this case include positive and negative sides of the perception of the place, experiences involving the power of nature in people's lives, memories of incidents at particular sites, delights, frustrations, irritations, demands, individual feelings, hopes, fears and wishes. My plan is to bring together these various cross-sections of our community to create maps that illuminate thoughts and feelings about the local environment.         The community map that will result from this process is not the usual topographical or land-use surveys, but rather a personal expression which tells people's stories of how they see their neighborhood and surrounding land. We are using visual art to map our experience of the bio-region of Tomales Bay, the waters and wetlands, the surrounding grassy hills, wooded valleys and streams, together with the Seashore lands and coast. The community of wild and domestic creatures, botanical species, even geological structures will also lend their voices to the mapping. As a way of engaging the senses as well as the intellect, we will not be using ordinary paper or cardboard, but rather selecting natural materials from the area itself to provide much of the raw material for the map. This is one of our assignments for the schools. Children are bringing in native grasses and soil samples from various areas, so that the place itself -- its color, its odor, its texture -- will literally be a part of the finished map. We are finding an immediate fascination and excitement displayed by the children when they see their own maps forming and beginning to communicate.

My hope is that the process of creating the final map will engender an artful awakening of the full ecological complexity of this area and an understanding of and respect for the rich resources we share. Mapping will bring inter-generational and inter-cultural groups, the old and young, the native and immigrant communities together for a common purpose that has deep environmental, social, and political implications.         There are highly successful precedents for community mapping. Rural and urban communities in Great Britain have produced delightful, innovative maps which have galvanized their communities in creative ways. Foremost among these has been the Common Ground Parish Maps Project which began in the early 1980s.         I have designed the Marinography Mapping Project as a journey of discovery consisting of three main phases:

1. Meetings, interviews, field trips and preparatory drawings, with an exhibition of preparatory art works and documentation. 2. Creation of finished map as mural and installation as a permanent display. 3. Production of printed and website versions of Map.         Eventually, at the culmination of the project, the core group of artists will coordinate the material as a mural-size map. This will be placed on permanent display in Point Reyes Station.         In a community map the voices of all sections of the population, elders, young ones, workers in different fields, different cultures, are given opportunities to be heard. Unexpected views are exposed. Sometimes activism on an issue may be spurred or harmful environmental practices curtailed as the light of personal witness is shone upon them. Special sights, sounds, scents are often vivid keys to memories about places, unlocking forgotten details of a place and experience. Another kind of map might be based on smell, color and sound, even taste, and certainly texture and temperature. I hope to reflect all these human possibilities in the Marinography Project.         Special thanks to the following for their assistance: Luc Chamberland, Mary Eubank, Dolores Gonzalez, Gwen Gordon, Barbara Khurana, Toni Littlejohn, Dewey Livingston, Sandra Niman, Claire Peaslee, Don Pidd, Lani Pinola, Andrew Romanoff, Lana Rose, Kathryn Roszak, Nancy Stein, Ellen Straus, the West Marin School staff, and members of the West Marin community. Support is also being given by Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. Further funds are being actively sought. Tax deductible donations will be gratefully accepted.

For more discussion of mapping as an ecological exercise, try the following links: Making a Community Map The People of West Marin Common Ground, the British Parish Mapping Project Geomancy, Architectural Form, and Maps of Consciousness A Note on the author, Christopher Castle

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© 1998 The Ecopsychology Institute

MAKING A COMMUNITY MAP Christopher Castle

Rarely is a map created to tell us the way people feel about a place. Our sense of place is in fact very much a product of the perceptions, individual, societal and cultural. And a map is more often than not a tacit cultural covenant that in turn affects our perception of the place. If we believe our world to made up of buildings, roads, fields, hills, our maps include these things. But places are also full of stories ...

Maps originated in primal marks portraying mythic regions of early human consciousness. They have evolved to the present when mapping has been applied to all aspects of objective knowledge. We now not only represent the Earth's surface in maps, but through radar, sonar, seismic probes, lasers, satellites and all the paraphernalia of modern science we map the minutiae of the physical universe at all scales. We map land uses, human resources, populations, statistics of all kinds, scientific data. Even opinions, meetings, states of mind, ideas, tendencies, and purely abstract notions are mapped. As one modern cartographer has put it, "anything that can be spatially conceived can be mapped - and probably has been."