Essay by Ed Quillen
Geography – December 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE ANNUAL Headwaters Conference at Western State College in Gunnison did what it was supposed to do this time around — make me think about things I don’t normally think about. I’m pretty good at getting bogged down in daily minutia, from firewood splitting to computer maintenance, and thus seldom step back to look at the bigger picture. When it comes to “not seeing the forest for the trees,” I suppose I prefer to look at the individual trees and rate their suitability as cordwood, rather than ponder biodiversity, ecosystems, endangered species, global warming, or other major matters.
But our culture — that mix of upbringing, education, economy, religion — plays a big part in how we regard the landscape and inhabit a place. Part of this Headwaters was devoted to how religious beliefs (dominion, stewardship, etc.) influence our view of the countryside.
However, there was one major and related element of modern geography that was not addressed, something I’ll call “Sacred Place Theory.”
The name is derived from “Central Place Theory,” which geographers use to describe the economic activities which take place at various distances from a city. This in turn sets the value of land.
Central Place Theory originated with an 1826 work by Johann Heinrich von Thünen, a gentleman farmer from Mecklenburg. He performed a thought experiment. Put a city in the middle of a plain of uniform fertility. What will be produced near the city or far from the city?
Von Thünen wrote that there would be two important factors — the value of the produce, and the cost to ship it. Crops which spoiled quickly and enjoyed a high value in relation to their shipping costs would be grown close to the city. So right outside town, there would be dairies (milk spoils quickly), orchards, market gardens, and truck farms.
Farther out, there would be extensive agriculture (i.e., wheat) and forestry. These products don’t spoil quickly, and they have a low value in relation to their bulk. Then you’d get to open-range grazing for livestock (with cowboys or drovers, they can transport themselves to market), and finally, some frontier territory with trapping, hunting, and related activities.
This is a gross oversimplification of real geography, since it omits mineral deposits, be they gold and silver, or coal, sand, and gravel. Also, because it was proposed in 1826, before railroads, let alone highways and airplanes, it neglects mechanized transportation.
BUT IT DOES EXPLAIN some things about Central Colorado, such as how ranching became a major part of the regional economy for generations. Land that sits a long way from urban areas, in a traditional economy, doesn’t have much of a productive use except to graze cows.
Or it didn’t at one time. Now remote ranchland can fetch a premium price as a homesite, thanks to factors that von Thünen didn’t consider, such as æsthetics (people enjoy a gorgeous view out the window) and a leisure class (people who can afford to keep a house they inhabit less than a month a year).
They’ve changed our economic geography, as Peter Decker explained in his 1998 book, Old Fences, New Neighbors: “Well into the late 1970s, the value of a ranch was determined by its water rights and hay-growing capacity…. Snow-capped mountains in the background and a babbling brook in the foreground did not increase a ranch’s productive value, nor did the cows concern themselves with the visual amenities of a property, caring only that the grass and water were plentiful.”
That’s a start on Central Place Theory and its decline as a useful way to analyze this part of the world. But what about Sacred Place Theory?
That term is probably too formal, because I haven’t formulated a theory. It’s more like a collection of observations. We can start with Sept. 11, 2001, “the day that changed everything.” (During this year’s election, candidates would offer themselves as realistic “Sept. 12 Americans,” as opposed to the ignorant “Sept. 10 Americans.”)
The men who flew the jetliners into the Pentagon and World Trade Center twin towers were part of the al Qaeda network led by Osama bin Laden. One reason they hated our country is that we had stationed our infidel soldiers in Saudi Arabia, which had an Islamic obligation to protect two sacred cities, Mecca and Medina, from such heretical influences.
So if we had a “Sacred Place Theory,” it might help explain why men felt inspired to kill 3,000 Americans one summer morning three years ago. America, according to bin Laden, was profaning some holy sites just by having soldiers in the same country as those sites.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, there’s the Holy Land, with its best-known city, Jerusalem — honored by Jews as the site of David’s capital and Solomon’s Temple, by Christians as the setting of the crucifixion and resurrection, by Muslims as the spot where the Prophet Mohammad ascended to heaven.
All manner of wars and contentions, from the Crusades to the Palestinian conflict, have revolved around this sacred site. Normal geography doesn’t explain why Jerusalem holds more importance than Cairo or Amman or Damascus — it doesn’t control important economic resources, it isn’t on a major trade route, it isn’t a port. To understand why wars are fought over Jerusalem, we’d need a Sacred Place Theory.
NOW, IT DOESN’T REQUIRE an extensive knowledge of the Bible or the Koran to see why Jerusalem is important to millions of people. Whether you’re a believer or not, it has major religious significance.
In this country, we also have to consider “sacred” places, although the process of sanctification confuses me. I can understand why the site of a supposed miracle or appearance could be considered sacred.
But the word often appears in other contexts. The site of the twin towers was the site of a mass murder — a great evil. But when New York City was considering what to do with those blocks, many people said it was “sacred ground.”
Similarly, when our retiring Sen. Ben Campbell was working to put the National Park Service in charge of the site of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado, there were people who called it a “sacred place.”
Here we have mass murder and a massacre, which are evil. And yet the sites of these evils become sacred? Memorializing them is one thing, but sanctifying them? How did this transmutation occur?
At least those were major historical events. In our New West, it doesn’t take that much. Tourist propaganda and real-estate brochures often mention how a given promontory or hot spring was “sacred to the Native Americans,” and often such claims have to be acknowledged by federal land managers. But were all of the sites that are now alleged to have been sacred actually considered sacred? And just how did Native Americans determine what was sacred?
ALL OF US WHO WANDER into the landscape have our special places, sites that provoke awe or inspire serenity, and I’m sure the Utes had theirs around here — but does that make a place sacred? Or does it take something more? Are those claims something that we should honor now? Or should we know and understand why a place is considered sacred before we honor its sanctity?
And what about newer claims that involve cosmic vortices and geomantic convergence points? And what about governmental tenets concerning the separation of church and state?
In such discussions, I start to feel grateful for my own religious upbringing — hard-shell fundamentalist Baptist. In Sunday School, we learned that God was everywhere, and thus no physical place was any more sacred than any other. For biblical proof, our teachers pointed out that to this day, no one knows the location of Mt. Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments — a place that ought to be sacred if there is such a thing as a sacred place. Further, when Moses died just before the Hebrews entered the Promised Land, God hid his body, lest it become a shrine: “No man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.”
But even if I was raised to believe that there’s no such thing as a sacred place, lots of people feel differently. They even extend it to vast areas, as in the common phrase “our sacred public lands.”
That’s sort of an echo of how mass murder on Sept. 11 sanctified commercial real-estate in Manhattan. Here we have land taken by force of arms — from Mexico and various tribes — and now it’s sacred? Again, what cosmic force is required for this transformation of the mundane to the transcendental?
At the Headwaters Conference, I ran into Peter Anderson of Crestone. He edits Pilgrimage, a twice-a-year journal with writings that “invite reflection, help to illuminate the world’s great wisdom traditions, encourage a deeper sense of home and place, and speak out for peace and justice.” He and I go back a long way — I gave him his first writing job about 25 years ago, when I was managing editor of Salida’s Mountain Mail and needed a Buena Vista correspondent.
We got to talking about “sacred places.” I mentioned my problems with the idea (the main one being that the world would be a more peaceful place if there were no sacred places to fight over), and he brought up another.
“If you say that a spot is sacred,” he observed, “then what does that say about other places? Are some places positively evil, while most of the world is just normal territory, neither good nor evil?”
And how would we identify those malignant spots on the earth’s surface?
In modern culture, the site of a great evil (i.e., Sand Creek, Ludlow, Ground Zero in Manhattan) becomes sacred in many eyes. Sites of tragedy also get sanctified, to some degree — witness those informal memorials which spring up along the road where there was a fatal auto accident.
So would the site of a great blessing become evil? That doesn’t work, since shrines often appear at these places.
SOME OF MY environmentalist friends would point to Bartlett Mountain and Mayflower Gulch, a dozen miles north of Leadville and the site of what was once the largest underground mine in the world. There, Climax Molybdenum hollowed out a mountain, and filled valleys with the waste. Or you could just go up Fryer Hill, east of Leadville, and see scores of old mines — scars on the landscape, and the setting for some epic displays of human greed, starting with prospectors and continuing through bloody labor wars.
But that hardly seems fair, since mining is something that humans have done for a long time in the Rocky Mountains — among the earlier archæological sites is a quarry near Rabbit Ears Pass, where for 8,000 years Indians mined quartzite (a flint-like stone) for spear and arrow heads, knives, scrapers, and the like.
BUT PERHAPS IT ISN’T the mining that corrupts a place; maybe it’s what you mine. Thus we might define uranium mines and mills as “the opposite of sacred places.” Often the metal was extracted for the purpose of destroying other people, and the process could poison miners and mill workers with radiation. In addition, the tailings remain a danger to this day; so there’s a good nomination, anyway.
From that, we could proceed to Rocky Flats, between Golden and Boulder, once an immense industrial facility where plutonium was fabricated into triggers for thermonuclear warheads. Sounds like a good candidate for an “unsacred place,” and it’s only a few miles from the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal on the north side of Denver, also known as “the most polluted place on earth.”
The arsenal was built in 1942 to produce poison gas. It went on to make nerve gas and incendiary bombs. Those are not pleasant items to contemplate, but on the other hand, they were deemed necessary for protecting the United States from the Axis, and then the Soviets. Defending against totalitarian systems isn’t evil, is it?
Beyond that, the arsenal site is today a National Wildlife Refuge; right on the edge of a metropolis, it has become a sanctuary for nearly 300 species of wildlife, including deer, coyotes, bald eagles and white pelicans. So where does it fit on the sacred site scale? Has it attained redemption, thanks to a long and expensive Superfund cleanup? Does this mean that mere human effort, without heavenly intervention, can sanctify a place?
And there’s the problem of our changing perceptions and values when we regard a landscape. When I was in grade school, our science texts explained how we were making great progress by draining or filling swamps, thereby converting these useless breeding grounds of pestilence into productive land. My kids learned that wetlands are vital to the environment, and must be protected and perhaps constructed and extended. That’s quite a transformation, from mephitic menace to a natural zone of water purification.
To move on, sacred places appear to be profitable places, at least to the regional publishing industry. One book came out in 2003 called Sites of Insight: Colorado Sacred Places, and it even won a prize from the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities. It points readers “to settings that inspire reverence for and contemplation about one’s relationship to the land.”
There’s also a guide to Colorado’s Sanctuaries, Retreats and Sacred Places, a guidebook which “catalogs nearly 100 of the state’s best sites for soul-searching.” Elsewhere, we read that “Colorado is home to powerful spirits that deserve our veneration and respect at all times. Colorado’s mountains are places of power and wisdom; places for pilgrimage rather than tourism.”
I HAVEN’T READ either book, but they do inspire the thought of a cognate work, something like A Guide to Colorado’s Evil, Malignant, Toxic, and Dangerous Places. It could start with Sand Creek on the Plains, Cannibal Plateau above Lake City, and Stillborn Alley in Leadville. Then it could go on to list river-killing Superfund sites, trees and trestles that held lynchings, major airplane crashes and train wrecks, militia camps, lethal avalanche runs, foundations of “dark and satanic mills,” acid mine drainages, etc.
And there’s a benevolent aspect to this: Nobody fights wars over evil places. Meanwhile, we have to figure out how to survive in a world with sacred places, and all the contention that comes with them. More and more, I’m coming to appreciate the fundamentalist Baptist view that all places were created equal. If everybody thought that way, it would prevent a lot of evil.
