Sense of Place and Sense of Planet Book Review: Search of the True Meaning of Planet

In today’s world the topic about the world, to be exact, about our planet has become to be one of the problematic one. The authors started to write articles, essays, even books about it. One of the examples of such books is Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. The book is written by an American author Ursula K. Heise, who is not only doing a research, but also teaching contemporary literature, environmental humanities, environmental literature, arts, etc., in so many countries.(uheise.net). The book is one of the most famous books written by Heise. In the mentioned book she touches the topics such as environmentalism, ecocriticism, post nationalism which are some actual topics of today’s world.

The book starts with a short story under the title of Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by the science fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. The story is about a man, Osden, facing difficulties on the planet called World 4470. He describes his state as ‘alien form’, saying “ Presence without mind. Awareness of being, but without object and subject”, which later on it is called ‘Nirvana’. By using this story in her book, the author wants to pass a message saying, nature will never do harm to us, it is usually people.

As it is estimated in the story, it was another human being who attacked Osden, and thanks to that, he found his peace in the nature. According to Ursula K. Heise, each one of us has a connection with the environment, it can be bad, however, in most cases it is a unique one. Therefore, she specifically describes it by using the main character of the story. The author sees Osden’s willingness to communicate with the nature, as he is eager to merge physically and psychologically with it.

In the first chapter of the book, Hiese extensively writes about environmentalism. The story that she started the book with, contains an emergence of the modern environmental movement in North American and western Europe in the early 70s. Additionally, it is fictionalized in the book that this is the year that enabled humans to recognize their planet from outer space for the first time, and it generated the images that henceforce has become icons of environmentalism. As the term environmentalism started to gain more recognition all around the world, it was fueled by powerful global visions, from the Gaia hypothesis to Spaceship Earth. The slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally” is now acknowledged by everyone as environmentalism established itself.

In this day and age, most countries’ one of the biggest problems is that they make a big deal out of nothing. In other words, when a problem occurs in a country, it should stay in the area of that country. She states a great example by Garrett Hardin, about him mocking the Global Pothole Authority as he calls it. In his opinion, global institutions are designed in a way that they are expected to deal with problems that would be much more efficiently solved at the local level, following the statement made by him: “Long experience has shown that local problems are best dealt with by local action.” She later on, finishes it with her words saying, we should never globalize a problem, if it can be dealt with locally.

All in all, the book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet is a great example for those who want to understand the meaning of ‘planet’, some important terms, such as environmentalism, modernism, post-nationalism and so on. Ursula K. Heise not only greatly explained their meanings, but also supported her ideas by giving examples from the authors like Buckminster Fuller, Garrett Hardin, Gary Snyder and many others.

Her research about deterritorialization and cosmopolitanism is a wonderful example of accurate explanation that it is used in so many websites by different people all around the world. Another thing that makes this book unique, is her mentioning the incident that happened in Chernobyl and Ozone layer. Undoubtedly, this topics need more attention nowadays. Thanks to the book, and of course, to Heise, even the next generation will have an understanding about this important topic and hopefully, will spread this to the next one.