Being the good student, as older students are expected to be, I immediately left and did my homework, reading a couple chapters of Biogeography. Let’s not say, ‘the bubble burst,’ in pure cliché. How about, ‘the helmet on my insulated spacesuit cracked, exposing me to the cold, harsh vacuum of outer space’? There’s information in this text, yes. It’s high in bold and italicized terms, moving from definition, to sub-definition, to other categories of things to define. Do I have to memorize these ‘for the test’? (There is a midterm test. Form unknown.) How do I sample this information? What makes this relevant? Irritated. The text is generalized, outlined, abstract. It isn’t asking me to think. Pictures would help. Story would be better. Argument.

Or connection. I jump to Wendell Berry, [and more on his books], a now-cranky-and-beloved Kentucky farmer, who uses his Masters in English to write about connections of land and people. In his collection, What Are People For?, one key essay, “The Work of Local Culture,” he states:

As local community decays along with local economy, a vast amnesia settles over the countryside. As the exposed and disregarded soil departs with the rains, so local knowledge and local memory move away to the cities or are forgotten under the influence of homogenized salestalk, entertainment, and education. This loss of local knowledge and local memory—that is, of local culture—has been ignored, or written off as one of the cheaper “prices of progress,” or made the business of folklorists. (p. 157)

Berry will point out more in his essay on this disjunction in education—that universities, and really, K-12, teach general knowledge, universals, at the expense of the local or regional. This fits, he continues, for young people who will move, over and over, following career. We become dis-inherited cogs in a larger economy, losing region, community, extended family. Perhaps some find Facebook as a replacement for this change, but I suspect we are now so far removed from any sense of location, that few people would be able to name this loss.

[Interesting side note: "Wendell Berry Takes Back His Papers"]

And in my first week of being acculturated into the world of Geography, I find eager technicians, but have heard nothing of connection to any place.

On the up side, I began Reading the Forested Landscape. The author describes his own teacher, John Marr, as “a rare ecologist who stressed the importance of having a strong emotional connection to landscapes alongside an analytical one” (p. 14).

Maybe yet there will be a place for poetry alongside GIS pinpricks.