Before clocks and the magnetic compass were used for way-finding, ancient navigators wove stick and sea-shell charts, and etched circular wooden rings with marks calibrated to the wind and stars. Guided by the experience of their ancestors, generations of sailors found their way across vast oceans by feel, by reading patterns in the waves, and by remembering maps of the heavens. These devices were not adjusted in reference to a steady north arrow, so skilled users made frequent course corrections. They had to read signs, discuss, and decide what to do.

This is very dangerous when you are far from shore, if constellations are obscured, or if you are beyond the experience of your ken. That’s why it is called dead reckoning: it only works as well as your last known position. It is also why navigation of this sort is such a ready symbolic reference for the ecologically dysfunctional way we humans interact with the natural world.
And this danger is biologically applicable at every scale: in our homes, our neighborhoods, and our communities. And learning our way out is hard when any moral compass we create is not easily applied at every scale and every landscape we experience. This is where stories can help.

I think clearer common language and shared imagery can lead to better decisions. My method is to document and spatially reference social history, events, and experiences in a landscape and craft stories wedded to an analysis meant to help us better understand human relationships with land. To create these stories I conduct interviews, carry out windshield surveys, look into past and current media reports, and examine land use, tax, zoning, and topographic maps. Public records and historic air photos are very helpful, and I often ground conflicting data with participant observation. Ongoing analysis of my efforts are empirically tied to digital maps that can inform the culture of land conservation, detect how decisions are culturally bound, and determine what should be considered in social impact assessment.

Since you’ve read this far, then maybe you also share the idea that we humans have lost our way, that our communities often have no sound way to navigate our relationship with the natural world. Maybe you also wonder: What is the vocabulary of our connection to ecosystems expressed on our local level? How do we make decisions? Act together? I think we are all on a journey to learn more about our connections to the people and places around us. Traditions from all over the world and throughout time share this idea. From Homer’s Odyssey to the Pollen Path of the Diné, from the Songlines of the Aborigines to the Stations of the Cross, people have created common references and shared cultural frameworks for navigating through life. In this sense, stories can be crafted to help us decide how to better relate to the land we live on.