It begins

8/23/10 First day of class. I was out late (playing Dungeons and Dragons), didn’t walk the dogs last night, so they were cranky this morning, my alarm wouldn’t reset so I had to reset the time to try to figure the right hour, no caffeine at home… Then I realized I’m a student, and didn’t need to shower or be presentable—I just had to find parking, put a ball cap on my morning hair, buy a cup of coffee, and get to class. I did.

Biogeography. This is a combined senior and grad level class. I like the teacher, though had a spurt of dread when he came in and plugged in his laptop, to begin his PowerPoint lecture. I’ve avoided ever using PowerPoint, not because it looks too hard, but because I dislike the way it pushes most teachers to a disengaged monotone, as if they had taught the class in making the slides, and the students in front of them were merely troublesome and ephemeral objects who might interrupt. Fortunately, this teacher uses the projection most for main headings and a great deal of illustration, while still talking ‘off-screen.’

We find out that Biogeography is in itself a somewhat marginalized facet of Geography, its subject matter often subsumed into other disciplines. (I rather like not starting in the mainstream, whatever that may be.) The books—Biogeography by Glen MacDonald and Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels—are appealing, new, and really why I signed up for this class. I had browsed the shelves in my first bookstore excursion and couldn’t quite put these out of mind. I’ve read William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England and the notion of “reading a landscape” appeals to me. My teacher [as yet nameless—haven’t decided if I should put in the names of my teachers] suggested this field urges us to “go out and look at the world,” while “looking for the clues to a place.” In the school travel blog, I found myself wishing I could have done this in Spain, tracing the history of trees and flowers, trying to sort out what might have been native, from the riot of life imported to Seville and Lisbon from the New World. I much envy Gary Nabhan’s ability to do this in his Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves—An American Naturalist in Italy . Maybe such ability is one reason I’m exploring Geography.

And so many other books by Nabhan I need to read:

Unnatural Landscapes: Tracking Invasive Species

Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food

Tequila: A Natural and Cultural History


So. I’m able to make a few connections.