Somewhere/ Anywhere

This weekend, we spent Thanksgiving in New Glasgow. While there, I had the chance to browse a book by Tim Marshall, The Age of Walls. This is his third book in the Politics of Place series. It includes chapters on walls in China, the United States, Israel and Palestine, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Europe and the United Kingdom. Of particular interest was the chapter on the UK and its relationship to the Brexit vote. Looking at the map of voters who want to stay in the European Union and those who want to leave. Scotland, Northern Ireland, some of the cities in England want to stay whereas ‘rural’ England want to leave the EU.

Marshall quotes from the book by David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere. According to Goodhart, there are ‘people who see the world from anywhere’ and ‘ people who see the world from somewhere’. It seems that it is that part of the population who see the world from somewhere who want to leave the EU.

Another Marshall quotation is taken from George Orwell’s essay The Lion and the Unicorn, written in the early ’40s.

“England is perhaps the only great country where the intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”.

Given the absence of Conservative and Liberal candidates at our local climate change debate last week, it was fortuitous that the Saturday, Chronicle Herald had a full page on the candidates from West Nova: Chris d’Entremont (Conservative), Jason Deveau (Liberal), Matthew Dubois (NDP) and Judy Green (Green).

For West Nova, the ‘somewhere’ in this case, the bottom line expressed by the candidates.
Conservative: resource industries and rural jobs
Liberal: health care, international trade in lobster
NDP: climate change
Green: poverty

Note. Gloria Cook, Veterans Coalition did not provide a profile.

Let me try to ‘join the dots’. If in Marshall’s words, we are ‘prisoners of Geography’. What can we say about West Nova in terms of the impact of place? Do we agree with our federal candidates? In Nova Scotia rural communities what is the balance between somewhere and anywhere? Are we talking about nested scales of geographic viewpoint?

Acknowledgements

John Stewart for access to his library book The Age of Walls.John DeMont for his column ‘NDPer running without much hope’ in Chronicle Herald, Saturday, October 12th. p. A13. Edward for adding the graphics.

Reference

Tim Marshall. 2018. The Age of Walls: How barriers between nations are changing the world. Scribner.
Chronicle Herald. Saturday, October 12, 2019. page A13.