Two Practices, One Way of Seeing
The above image is an interesting one – not because it’s unique in some way but because it represents the intersection of the two main paths of my work – community and landscape resilience and forms of traveling in landscapes. Both these ultimately contribute to sustainable futures.
Conversations with Communities (CwC) and LoST Travel (Landscapes of Stories and Time) might initially seem like two quite different practices. One is concerned with how we work with communities, the other with how we travel through landscapes and places. Yet both begin with many of the same questions, questions like: What are we noticing? Who are we listening to? What stories shape this place? What has happened here over time? Whose knowledge matters? And what responsibilities do we carry when we enter a community or landscape that is not our own?
This is the idea behind Two Practices, One Way of Seeing. CwC and LoST remain distinct, but they share an approach based on attention, curiosity, listening, reflection and respect. Both ask us to slow down so that we understand a place. Both encourage us to recognise that what we encounter has a history that began long before we arrived. And both challenge the assumption that our role is necessarily to intervene, interpret or provide answers.
Through Conversations with Communities, this way of seeing is applied to community practice. Too often, communities are approached through projects, programs, consultations or problems that need to be solved. We arrive with objectives, timelines, professional knowledge and ideas about what needs to change. CwC asks us to begin somewhere else: with conversation. It encourages us to listen for local knowledge, recognise different voices and perspectives, understand relationships and power, and pay attention to the ways communities themselves understand their circumstances. Community practice then becomes less about doing things to or for communities and more about creating the conditions for people to participate, contribute and shape change themselves.
LoST Travel applies a similar approach to travel. Landscapes are easily reduced to scenery, destinations, attractions and experiences. We arrive, photograph, walk, cycle, paddle or pass through, often knowing relatively little about the places around us. LoST asks us to slow down and look again. A mountain valley is not simply a beautiful landscape. A village is not simply somewhere along a walking route. A river is not simply something to cross or to paddle down. Each is part of a landscape shaped by people, ecology, livelihoods, movement, memory, conflict, adaptation and change.
This is where the two practices begin to speak to each other.
CwC reminds the traveller that communities are not backdrops. LoST reminds the community practitioner that landscapes are not backdrops. People can’t easily be separated from the places in which they live, just as landscapes can’t be understood without considering the people, histories and relationships that have shaped them.
There are other connections. Observation matters before engagement. Listening matters before interpretation. Stories are forms of knowledge. Time matters because the present has been shaped by what came before it. Power influences whose stories are heard and whose versions of a place become dominant. Restraint matters because sometimes the most appropriate response is not to intervene, photograph, explain or speak, but simply to listen and understand.
This doesn’t mean turning community practitioners into travellers or travellers into community development practitioners. The value lies in allowing each practice to challenge the other. What might someone working with communities learn from slowing down, walking through a landscape and observing before asking questions? What might a traveller learn from community development about power, participation, local knowledge and the ethics of entering another person’s place?
These questions sit at the heart of the LST Collaboration Hub (Localities. Sustainabilities. Transformations). The Hub brings CwC and LoST together without collapsing the distinction between them. CwC explores how we engage with communities. LoST explores how we move through landscapes and places.
The connection is a shared practice of seeing.
To see more carefully is to recognise stories where we once saw only scenery, relationships where we once saw individuals, histories where we once saw the present, and complexity where we once expected simple answers.
Two practices. One way of seeing. And perhaps, through seeing differently, different ways of engaging, travelling and contributing to change.
