From Somewheres & Anywheres to Everyone Everywhere

In a meeting recently I was reminded of the British journalist David Goddart, who, in 2017, described the new polarities he saw emerging in British culture as being a ‘contest between Anywheres and Somewheres’; a culture which ultimately led to Brexit.

He characterised the two protagonists as the Somewheres as being people who are more locally rooted and conservative who felt left behind by politics and the economy, as opposed to the Anywheres who are globalists that are well adapted to change. The Somewheres, he said,?attribute a large part of their identities to their place of origin or local communities and are less likely to move. The Anywheres on the other hand, form an identity based on their life experiences rather than a place of origin; they are a highly mobile population usually attracted to large urban cities.

Although he largely wrote about this story in a political UK context, it is a polarity that applies all over the world in different contexts, and a prime example of the Story of Separation that plays out economically and socially between humans and other humans. We love to simplify and polarise to help us make sense of complex situations. Yet binary simplicity is rarely the whole story.

Are you an Anywhere or a Somewhere? Or Somewhere inbetween?

I like to think I am culturally an Anywhere who has lived in many different countries, been privileged to be able to travel almost anywhere as a British passport holder. I am someone who - although I started out from a poor family who were definitely Goddart’s definition of Somewheres - managed through success in my career to ‘escape’ the Somewheres and become an Anywhere. When I think of what it means to me to be an Anywhere, I think of it in terms of a love of diversity, a love of different cultures and people and places, a deep acceptance and celebration of difference. I don't think of it as being a perspective of academic or achievement snobbery as Goddart did.

And yet in my search for rooted community and belonging, I have also been a Somewhere who has long been searching for my own rooted home. I have ‘belonged’ to Brixton London, Verbier in Switzerland, Stockholm in Sweden, Hyeres in the South of France, and even briefly, New York.?Somehow I have only truly recently become rooted in West Sussex and the Azores. My spiritual soil is in both places. I am an Anywhere, a Somewhere, and an Every Lifer - including the more-then-human.

The urge to come home to Place is strong within us. Many children of diplomat parents who were regularly uprooted every few years to live in yet another country have amazing stories to tell about their travels, are culturally global and worldly, - and yet often have a deep yearning to belong somewhere for more than just a transitory, fleeting moment in time. In our world of many global nomads, belonging is still a powerful yearning of the human spirit that cannot solely be fed by being a member of 100 Facebook groups. It has a physical driver to it that includes a deep connection to the land as well as the people who live on it.

The privilege of Anywhere

I am also more acutely aware since starting to run our online journeys at Really Regenerative, that the polarities apply over many different sectors, including structural systems and economics. Participants from as far away as Indonesia, Syria, Zimbabwe, Peru or Japan can be included in an online learning journey without the onerous challenge of having to get visas to travel to study or to a conference - which can be incredibly difficult for some passport holders, if not impossible. The ‘wrong’ passport excludes you from many places. But even if I offer bursaries and reductions, they can still only participate if they have to funds to buy expensive currencies like Dollars, Pounds and Euros, and can pay using globalised credit forms like Visa, MasterCard or bank transfer which often offer them less attractive transfer rates than Paypal or Stripe which, in our organisation, we use less and less. We may have to start using them again.?

Global travel has become such a deeply embedded aspiration in our human psyche these days. People from all over the world aspire to be citizens of our world, and yet their capacity to participate in that global world is not equal - sometimes resulting in hideous forms of human trafficking to get people from one side of the global with small opportunity to be an Anywhere to somewhere where they can. The same applies to global education. You can get an international education almost anywhere in the world today. If you can get a visa and probably if your parents are Anywheres who can afford to send you half way around the world.

Today I no longer travel the way I used to. Not for business and not for pleasure. I have re-oriented the way I work to work from where I am. In the same way that digital created nomads, it is now creating home-ads too. Do I miss global travel??Of course. I miss the rush of experiencing new cultures I haven’t seen before. I desperately miss the opportunity to sit in amongst wild landscapes and see the wildlife that doesn’t exist in my own landscape. Much as I love his work David Attenborough is still not the same as the real thing. Do I miss global business travel? Not at all. Endless airports, hotels and taxis that all look the same, and at the end of it a high street that has all the same shops on I can find in my local city, London. In one way cities that are Anywhere have started to look like cities that are Anywhere else due to globalisation. They are losing their distinctiveness in pursuit of global norms.

A Future for Everyone Everywhere?

What does the future hold? Facing into the existential threat of climate change, our global economy is going to have to change radically. We have to consider ways in which to re-localise those parts of the economy that we can to reduce the emissions created by international trade and transport of all kinds. To what extent does that mean we need to embrace a love of being a Somewhere as well as holding an aspiration to be an Anywhere? What is the new 'us' we are called to imagine?

One of the critical ways in which we can begin to more easily address the complexities we face is by using the same scale-linking processes that nature does.?As Daniel Christian Wahl says:

"Since nature is fundamentally scale-linking — connecting the molecular to the planetary and the local to the global — adaptive cycles of any particular system at any particular scale (e.g.: local community, bioregion, nation or planet) are linked to multiple adaptive cycles that are taking place simultaneously for smaller systems contained by that system and for the larger systems within which that particular system is embedded."

If that sounds complicated, it translates to the need for us all to start to think more as Somewheres than Anywheres in the way in which we live and to reinhabit our planet differently - from Place-sourced potential and health first, with a firm eye on our impact on planetary scale and health.

How shall we change the aspiration to change our fortunes by changing our status from being a Somewhere to an Anywhere??How can we fall more in love with place - our own places - again, in order to help transform the impact of our global economies??The global pandemic has helped. It has given us all a moment to reconnect with the narrow landscape of the city, village or landscape immediately around us. Many people have found new joy in their locality they had no idea even existed.

I recall Brene Brown talking about the ‘wholehearted’ in her famous Ted talk about vulnerability. I imagine the wholehearted to be people who are Somewheres - with rooted community, a commitment to the people and the place in which they live and work. I notice that my mind automatically goes towards people with local legend but also deep spiritual connection to the land such as the Amish people who have been romanticised in popular culture and film. I think of these kind of communities with deep curiosity and no small amount of claustrophobia as I struggle to imagine a life of such intense rootedness and lack of access to difference and diversity. I also think of the innate connecttion with the rythyms of life of the indigenous peoples of the world who have a deep spiritual connection with the living systems of nature which I sense is a different way of seeing life. There is something about the rooted wholeheartedness of rural community that seems to lack aspiration in our modern world. A perception or narrative in my own head that is something to keep working on for me. Perhaps we need to learn to aspire to different things?

These are some of the paradoxes we explore in our online learning journey Power of Place . What does it look like to create economies and cultures that celebrate and operate at the bioregional and local level? How do we find a new balance of Anywheres and Somewheres in or world and work on this ongoing story of separation so that we start to celebrate Somewheres as much as Anywheres and begin to aspire to be a Somewhere as much as an Anywhere??Can we design a world where Anywheres Somewheres and Every Life - both the human and the more-than-human live fulfilled and not restricted?

Our final live pre course webinar is this Thursday at 4pm UK | 5pm CET if you would like to join us. Course registrations close on August 20th. You can also find out more in this recorded webinar.

Look forward to seeing you Somewhere online in the near future. Online at least, is A Place where you could be Anywhere.