The American poet, Gary Snyder, once suggested that, "The most radical thing you can do is stay home."

Perhaps he should know. He began his poetic career in the 1960s amid the social tumult of the hippies, the beat generation and the earnest search for a system of values that could replace the growing force of materialism and consumerism as it was picking up frenetic speed and compulsive momentum. His search for insight eventually took him to Japan, to Zen monasteries and to years of disciplined and focused practice as a monk. When he finally returned to his native California after attaining some mastery of this special way of understanding, he bought land high in the Sierra mountains, became the informal centre of a community of like-minded thinkers, then settled into years of writing poetry, gardening, harvesting from the wilds, and becoming intimately familiar with the complex character of his natural surroundings. This intimacy with place became the hallmark of his ideas about living our lives fully and deeply by establishing the roots that ground us in our local world.

Curiously, the Latin source of the word "radical" comes from "root", and it means going to the centre, finding and drawing from fundamentals, initiating the extreme changes that return us to something deeply essential and specially human.

Rebecca Solnit, touches on these ideas in a thoughtful essay she wrote for Orion Magazine (Nov./Dec. 08). She suggests that we could help to "save the world" by "living smaller, staying closer, having less", that we could better ourselves and humanity by finding the modesty of being more local and more connected to where we actually reside. Instead, we have cultivated this mania for movement. "From outer space," Solnit notes, "the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that's been stirred with a stick."

Indeed, our energetic movement must seem frantic to any detached observer. Not only do we speed en masse within cities, but we travel with equal zeal in and out of cities, across countrysides, nations and continents. And, all the while we are lured to international locations with – as Solnit is quick to remind us – "models of hectic and exotic travel" thinly disguised as vacations, holidays and adventure tours. And so much of this movement transports us to "the limbo of nowheres", to the "malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands" that are little more than the material embodiments of "transnational corporate products". She summarizes this collective behaviour of ours as a "strange postwar bubble of affluence with its frenzy of building, destroying, shipping and travelling".

Well, travel can be useful. It acquaints us with other cultures, thereby providing the perspective that defines ourselves. Travel also defines the geography where we live, placing it in the context of a global awareness. Which is what happened to Gary Snyder. The effect of his travelling was to help him discover the root value of local. By living in a global world, his discovery of the local begins to explain why staying home is the most radical thing we can do.

Somewhat like the Zen discipline of meditating, staying home forces us to focus, to pay attention, and to be exactly where we are. So we don't dream of escape. And we don't diminish the imperative of the local by imagining we can leave for somewhere else. A commitment to where we are heightens the acuity of our perceptions and sharpens our sense of connection. An undivided attention forces us to notice our immediate surroundings and to accept responsibility for whatever is happening around us. So we become more engaged, in every sense of the word.

This discipline of engagement with the local keeps us present – in more than just the meditative sense of being exactly where we are, without the mind wandering away to disconnected places and thoughts. The ultimate effect is a clarity of awareness and a focus of energy that is applied to all things local. We become more conscious of the rhythm of seasons and weather, of growth and stasis, of the shifting moods and nuances of nature. We sense the outer changes as if they were an extension of ourselves, as if our bodies were wearing the place where we live. We enter the year exactly as it is offered, without the distraction of escape on planes and ships. Then our own lives become an extension of our community's life. So we better the world by becoming engaged where we belong.

Travellers who return home often describe how the time away has freshened their awareness of the local. This insight is valuable and laudable. But a deeper and more powerful insight comes from the discipline of staying home and then seeing every moment of every day afresh, of awakening each morning to find a new combination of wonders adorning the local dawn. Promise, adventure, amazement, discovery and mystery fill each hour. With roots firmly planted in such a time and place, then the ordinary truly becomes radical.