Projects

for 9/3

Naively, I’m still trying to place myself in this new field. I brainstorm projects, things I’d like to work on, though even as I sketch them here, I realize I don’t have the tools to complete these.

--Look at the way Boone Electric Coop deals with trees. We had another episode of tree-butchery up and down my road recently. Their hired tree service says that now the Coop wants to clear under power lines for a 5 year span, which means they either take the trees to the ground, cut off edges, or take off the tree tops. Lots of this last in front of my yard. When they remove trees from a yard, they do (or used to) offer replacement saplings, in a narrow realm of species—“well-mannered” trees. I’d like to investigate how their approaches have impacted tree health and range of species. And maybe if anyone but me notices.

--Map the churches in this area, though surely someone has done that already. The physical location of churches, memberships numbers, think about whether location itself has anything to do with numbers, ideally (and unlikely) get addresses of members and look at the way members are distributed in relation to the church. And later steps would be interviews to characterize belief systems—politics, ideas about landuse, the environment...

--A similar thing with St. Francis House, a Catholic Workers community that cares for homeless folks. What kind of human networks grow from this center? How transient is this population?

--Continue making a documentary film about businesses on 9th Street in Columbia, which has become a kind of community. Look at how long businesses have been in place, at links between businesses, at who their patrons are. (Lakota, Panera, 9th St. Video, the Blue Note...)

--Sketch out my own version of a geographic education. Presumptuous, of course, this early, though in education/teaching terms, I’m not a beginner at all. I wonder whether the lecture-based, topic-coverage approach, as in UMC’s Regions and Nations, is that effective. E.g., Tim, a bartender at the Berg, recalled my teacher from years ago, in a U.S.-Canada Geography class. But what he remembered was that the teacher told great stories, and that the stories made everything else easy to remember. I think I would tap into this basic human love of narrative, as much as possible—with novels, poems, films—and whenever I could, avoid the formal textbook, in favor of whole books. And I’d push writing throughout—about places, nature, unraveling environmental ideas. Hmm. We’ll see.

--Chapter 2 of my text Geography & Geographers starts with this quote, defining geographical imagination: “A sensitivity toward the significance of PLACE and SPACE, LANDSCAPE and NATURE in the constitution and conduct of life on earth. As such, a geographical imagination is by no means the exclusive preserve of the academic discipline of geography..." Gregory, 2000. From that notion, I return to what is maybe always my main ambition—to write a different order of poetry.

bob