Touch Grass: Communicating Place in a Screen-Obsessed World

Earlier this week I went for a jog along the steely and turbid East River, the wild tidal estuary that is that cause of New York City. Lower Manhattan was a gray collection of towers with Brooklyn’s power plants and industrial-turned-luxury buildings across the swirling currents. The new plantings of the East River Park were patches of yellow grass and bare sticks in winter dormancy. It was not a postcard day, but I felt refreshed by moving my body across the urban landscape.

In his influential book, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sounds the alarm about the effects of a “screen-based childhood” on the development of the human psyche. He lays out the research on how our smart-phone addicted lifestyles are making sad, lonely and depraved, arguing that it is crucial to bring back the “grounded childhood” for kids to grow up into confident and connected people.

The “grounded childhood” Haidt describes involves unstructured play, real-world experiences and independent exploration. In contrast, most people born after 2010 have experienced some level of screen-based childhood, where they were overly monitored in the real world, and unprotected from the wild world of content online.

Recognizing the miraculous utility of the smart phone, I doubt that any of us has had a day when when we lay our heads to rest thinking, “wow, I wish I had spent more time staring at that screen – more content would have made me feel more alive and connected.”

For now, and since the beginning of our species, we are children of the Earth. Every inch of place is unique, alive and interconnected. Places that are paved over, eroded and poisoned, as well as places that are in-tact, restored, and cared for bare witness to and the literal weight of all that roots, walks and is built upon it. When I think about branding a place, whether it be a private lot or a collectively-managed watershed, I always know there will be plenty of material to work with when we dig in.

I’m passionate about branding land-based projects and organizations not only because our most important task as a society is halting and reversing climate change, but because places are inherently real and storied. When it comes to places, you don’t have to make things up, you just have to tap in and “touch grass.”

In our click-bait-flooded, screen-addicted culture, connecting with and noticing place makes us feel grounded and purposeful. When you communicate about your place, consider that what you are doing makes impact beyond your specific project goals, as important as they may be. By defining and sharing what is unique about the patch of Earth you care for, you are helping us all reconnect.