‘Sense of Place’

* Re “Gas Bounty Amid Natural Treasures: A Volatile Mix,” April 30: William Perry Pendley, who seeks to overturn the ban on oil and gas leasing in portions of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, claims that no one has ever heard of the concept of remote frontier evoking a special “sense of place.”

Who is he trying to kid? The concept has been with us for centuries. Henry David Thoreau wrote of place: “Where the land, the flora and fauna, the people, their culture, their language and arts were still ordered by energies and interests fundamentally their own, not by the homogenization and normalization of modern life.” William Mulholland horrified a National Park Service official when he suggested that Yosemite Valley would serve a greater public good if the whole thing was dammed. Of course, that sentiment would eerily come true with the damming of John Muir’s beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley.

In the late 1960s, Walter Benjamin examined the quality of place as a culminating experience resulting into a synthesis of “aura”--a unique presence in time and space. It is sad to realize that there are people who do not understand that “a sense of place” is a value unto itself and cannot be measured with a price tag.

ANDREA LEIGH

Van Nuys