“But is it possible to be rooted in a suburb, or is this oxymoronix?I’ve often reflected that those monotonous spaces clash with the nothion of being somewhere specific. Suburbs are entangled in twenty-first-century globalism, ina single Flat World culture that has become a ubiquitous nowhere. My Long Island rootlessness flowed naturally into a kind of jet-fueled global nomadic life, in which I lost an essential part of adulthood: finding one’s proper place.
Naipaul’s area of darkness is a colonial system that degrades the human spirit. My area of darkness is the price of my privilege, and ecocide that degrades and poisons the human being while it destroys our very host, Mother Earth. The global economy gobbles up authentic places and vomits up McWorld, increasingly turning our collective proper place, this planet, into a dystopia. I’m a child of ecocide, caught in a catch-22. How can I get on that plane-yet how can I not get on that plane-knowing that an estimated half of all species today could become extinct due to the effects of climate change? This is my area of darkness; a living earth, no longer underfoot.”[i]
[i] Powers, William, (2010). Twelve By Twelve, A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream, New World Library,84-85
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