An Almanac

I’ve started my “yard photos,” hoping to picture every day of a year, and briefly talk about what bit of nature I see or hear. This to be my own beginning “almanac” of birds and plants and frogs and weather. Of course, it will from the start be incomplete, because I know I’ll be out of the country now and then. Maybe the folks who take care of my dogs can be convinced to snap a few shots, or take time to listen to the world. And how to record all this—what sort of file, website, blog? Don’t know.

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

Is this Geography?

I still struggle to figure out what the boundaries of this new discipline are. After some readings, I emailed a test idea to one of my teachers.

My email:

Let me try this out--I'm still trying to "feel" what Geography would do in given circumstances.

Say I did a project studying The Berg, framed in terms of land-use. Specifically the Berg as a site of cultural resistance to the insatiable "hunger" of the University to expand and claim all the land on its periphery. (hunger might have to be defined in expansion proposals, long-term plans, property bids, threat of eminent domain seizures, etc.)

A parallel case, The Shack and the various small businesses previously where the Alum Center is now (including a rather popular Sub Shop)--these businesses failed to resist the University demands, despite the cartoon art link and some alumni support. The Berg, even after burned to the ground, remains in place today.

I would speculate that there is a tension in land-use here, between the University and various centers of cultural resistance: The Berg (with extensive alum support), Shakespeares (similar popularity), the 9th St. Methodist Church, and the Missouri Theater (extensive art community support, overlapping with UM faculty). These seem to be centers that limit UMC expansion in this direction, although there have been inroads with the Henkel Bldg (7th St?), new J-school property north of Elm, and the Hitt St parking garage. The former blood bank, behind the Berg, didn't survive, though it's tied up in some dispute between the landlord and the need to widen an alley, move an electric grid, and big expenses.

So, if I looked at how and why the Berg has been able to stay in place--is that Geography? Or have I drifted into naive Sociology, or Anthro, or even the porous domain of American Studies?

The response:

The short answer is yes, absolutely: this is Geography. I like the idea of studying the cultural politics of the University-downtown/residential border in general; you could then pick out places like the Berg as case studies of a broader tension there at the "borderlands." I also think that these "borderlands" also exhibit a cultural politics of walking/pedestrian versus car use ... so you could extend your cultural-geographic interpretation of this distinctive landscape into other areas beyond real-estate/expansionism.

Progress...

Environmental Education

A major thread of my interest in Geography springs from my work in Environmental Education. Back in the mid90s, I "started" Columbia College's Environmental Studies program by posting a note on the faculty refrigerator asking to meet with anyone intersted. The first response was from Peter Meserve, our school's lonely Geographer. Together, we gathered a dozen interested parties, nagged them into a year of meetings, aruged, I did a survey of interest with several 100 students, wrote up the formal self-study, and we eventually got a very interdisciplinary minor in Environmental Studies. Course code, ENVS.

Course codes here are everything. The minor did well enough to evolve into a major, but people drifted away, classes shrank. The science department reformed all this so that ENVS became Environmental Science. They do now have a very good major and minor, well-focused on science--but very few Business or History or English majors are likely to take "Molecular Biotechnology" or "Genetics." And I can't create the Humanities-based courses I need to.

So, I've started canvassing for a new minor, and a new course code--which means talking to dozens of people, handing out a concise piece of paper, looking for an administrative home for the minor. Here's where we are:

Proposal 8/15/2010

Let me suggest that we create a new minor at CC, Ecological Studies, ECOS, to bring together the crucial information about the environment from the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences. The recent change of Environmental Studies to Environmental Science has left CC without a direct and accessible venue to educate non-science majors in issues of Ecological Literacy*. This approximately 95% of our students are the ones who will vote, teach and raise children; they won’t all take a complete science sequence, but they must know how to interpret and evaluate this knowledge. This minor would offer such a venue, not only on the home campus, but especially in the scattered realms we reach through our online and Nationwide campuses. One good place to house this minor would be the Humanities Dept.

Required: (6 hours)

ENVS 115 Introduction to Environmental Science (without lab requirement)
ENVS 272 Introduction to Environmental Literature

Electives: (to complete at least 12 more hours)

BIOL/ENVS 222 Conservation Biology
ECON 310 Environmental and Resource Economics
EDUC 372 Environmental Education
ENGL 360 Environmental Novels
GEOG 220 Introduction to Atmospheric Sciences
GEOG 223 Environmental Disasters
GEOG 251 Resource Management
HIST 352 American Environmental History
PHIL 332 Environmental Ethics
POSC 312 Environmental Politics
any one other ENVS course, 200, 300, or 400-level
ENGL 310, 350, 360, 361, 362, or 370, when on appropriate topic
233/333/433 Topics, pre-approved

--------------------------- 18 hours total for this minor

Suggestions for courses that could be developed:

PSYC 3xx Environmental Psychology [Chris Mazurek]
PSYC 333 Existential Phenomenology [Graham Higgs]
SOCI 3xx Environmental Sociology [Yngve Digernes]
MGMT 4xx Green Business Practices
COMM 3xx Green Social Movements [Amy Darnell]
COMM 4xx The Environmental Message: Advertising, Rhetoric, Film
RELI or GEOG 2xx Religious Views of Nature and the Environment
ARTS 3xx Representing Nature

*"The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities – communities that are designed in such a way that their ways of life, businesses, economies, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. The first step in this endeavor is to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. This understanding is what we call ecological literacy.

"Teaching this ecological knowledge – which may be called 'principles of ecology,' 'principles of sustainability,' 'principles of community,' or even the 'basic facts of life' – will be the most important role of education in the next century. " by Fritjof Capra, http://www.hent.org/ecoliteracy.htm

“Ecological literacy (also referred to as ecoliteracy) is the ability to understand the natural systems that make life on earth possible. To be ecoliterate means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (i.e. ecosystems) and using those principles for creating sustainable human communities. The term was coined by American educator David W. Orr and physicist Fritjof Capra in the 1990s- thereby a new value entered education; the “well-being of the earth”. An ecologically literate society would be a sustainable society which did not destroy the natural environment on which they depend. Ecological literacy is a powerful concept as it creates a foundation for an integrated approach to environmental problems. Advocates champion eco-literacy as a new educational paradigm emerging around the poles of holism, systems thinking, sustainability, and complexity.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_literacy

Some hope for this. Waiting for the Humanities Dept. to thumbs up or down.

Later

Student interview

Hmm...an email interview by a student working for the school paper, about our annual study abroad trips. Her questions:

1) What is your roll or involvment with the ef trips?
2) how many have you gone on?
3) How do u think students benefit from these trips?
4) What kind of things or places will the students get to see or do during the guided tours?
5) Is there any kind of security policies the teachers inforce on the students and other travelers for safety?

Thanks for ur time

My response:

1. I guess I'm an unofficial co-leader. I work quite a bit on arguing through the trip itinerary, advertising (have you seen some of our weird fliers through the years?), and help during the trip--mostly keeping people from getting lost. Oh, I teach one or two courses each trip--usually Travel Writing, and some sort of literature.

A new thing I started last year is our trip blog. Find this at http://cctravelers.blogspot.com/ I encouraged all the teachers and some of the students doing course projects to contribute. We had a good beginning last year, and hope this year to have quite a bit more involvement.

Ideally, some year, we will also add more video feed during our trip for people to watch here. Working on that.

2. I've gone on all the trips, including the first semi-official trip to Costa Rica, which was organized by Graham Higgs.

3. Students benefit not only from the academic experience, but also from the personal exposure to new cultures. Many students have never been outside the U.S., some not out of Missouri, and this opens a fast, stunning window on the world. Seeing the world via TV and youTube is not the same. The experience of dealing with the airport, airplanes, passports, new food, a new language environment, customs that differ, and then the things we visit on the tour, the "big sights"--all these together have the impact of a dozen courses leaking out of dull textbooks here at home.

4. The things we see vary quite a bit with the country. On European trips, we see lots of the formal culture--palaces, cathedrals, museums. So in Italy, we saw the Coloseum, the Vatican, the Duomo on Florence, the statue of David, the Birth of Venus. walked across the Bridge of Sighs in the Dogo's Palace in Venice--and rode in a gondola. [get pictures of these things, if this is all done as a web-version...]

In Egypt, we had a 3-day luxury cruise on the Nile, stopping to see ancient temples, then got back to Cairo and rode camels around the Pyramids.

In Costa Rica, we toured the capital city, explored a cloud forest, stood on the Continental Divide where we could see both the Atlantic and the Pacific, took a zip-line through the rain forest canopy, and watched the surfers out past the black sand beaches.

In New Zealand, we visited the national aquarium, visited volcanic mud pits, watched a traditional native story-dance, and at an extreme sport center, Ann and I and 2 students tried bungee-jumping.

So, that kind of stuff...

5. Security is mostly provided by the tour company and the expert guide. We mostly try to keep people from wandering off during the visits here and there. There are quite a few distractions.

I think I provided pretty good material, but alas, there were no quotes in her short article. Distressing when all the flavor is squeezed out of experience.

Stuff

This will be an odd assortment, but as I think of strange projects I want to go do, I keep finding material, information and training things I need. A list:

a GPS camera--one that tags the image with date, time, and GPS signature

a video camera--for interviews, mostly, either on the level of folklore or documentary film

a good voice recorder

editing programs for still and video images, and instantaneous training on how to use them

headphones/mike for laptop--for Skype conversations, for learning languages...

a botany class

a mapping class

the syllabus for the still taught "Regions and Nations" course

an indigenous language

a review of folklore collection techniques

the Persian language--and already, a teasing and not quite possible opportunity, in an email from the Geography Chair:

Hi All,

Would you like to be funded to learn Arabic or another of the world's "strategic languages," as identified by Uncle Sam?

The applications for the 2011-2012 National Security Education Program's David L. Boren Scholarships for undergraduate students and Fellowships for graduate students are now available at http://www.borenawards.org/ Boren Awards provide unique funding opportunities for U.S. students to study in Africa, Asia, Central & Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East, where they can add important international and language components to their educations.

But this involves a year studying in Maryland, then a year in Tajikistan. Both would be swell, but there's not enough money to keep paying my mortgage, take care of the dogs, ...

Portugeuse--to get me to Brazil

Such a simple wish list. Where were those 4 or 5 other idle years when I could have engaged all this experience?

Carl Sauer

One of the lectures we read the second week for Geographic Thought is Carl Sauer's "The Education of a Geographer"--from Sept. 1956.

I've mostly skimmed out some bits and quotes here that I responded to, starting with, "We may draw no invidious distinction between professional and amateur; both are needed as cherishing and contributing to geographic knowledge."

Ah, I wish this were so--a lecture delivered when I was 5 months old. Before Sputnik. Before the Apollo program. Before pcs, cell phones, the web. Post-nuclear, not post-modern. Sauer throughout this lecture describes a geography that I might feel more at home with. More bits:

"The geographer ... comes rather late into our professional care."

"Ours is a task of slow accumulation of knowledge, experience, and judgment...We do not gain competence quickly, nor by the learning of ine special skill."

And Sauer would not rely solely on undergraduate geography majors: "we still get much of our best blood from those who come from quite other academic stocks and backgrounds," and later, "I doubt that undergraduate majors in geography are to be recommended for those who will continue as graduate students." Sauer prefers a "properly balanced liberal education"--key words for me, having bounced between so many majors, never quite finding something whole enough. [Chemical Engineering, to Biochemistry, to tutoring Engineering Physics, but a degree in Psychology, then a surprise Masters and Ph.D. in English, with a not quite complete masters in Counseling Psych in the middle.]

More of Sauer:

"Especially do we need more workers who like and are able to live on frontiers, such as those of biology."

"Putting labels on beginners herds them into premature profession." This seems such a flaw in so much of contemporary college--at Columbia College, our INCC course ["how to be a freshmen," 1 credit hour] stresses career testing, demands students have a major and complete a written "4 year plan," sketching out in dreary detail each semester ahead of them, contracts for benefit of parents, so that if courses aren't offered in perfect sync with these major plans, there is some financial compensation, and so on. There isn't much room for genuine exploration, and few students have a sense of what value an actual liberal education might have.

Sauer finds "liking maps" at the heart of geography, and states that "The geographer and the geographer-to-be are travellers, vicarious when they must, actual when they may." I would say "of course" to this, but I avoided telling anyone in my application/interview process just how much I do travel--approaching 80 countries, if I count airport and train passage countries. Somehow, all the professionalism made this feel, well, frivolous.

Geography is "always a reading of the face of the earth," but "Time-consuming precision of location, limit, and area is rarely needed." This a statement that certainly veers away from the department's current emphasis on GIS. He adds his "growing conviction that we must not strain to make geography quantitative." Further, he wishes to "underscore the unspecialized quality of geography."

He states that the regional course must bebased on personal experience and "much meditation." I don't disagree with this, though I have already been frustrated in trying to get my Iran/Iraq 101 courses approved for the CC Evening prograph, where perhaps unwisely a 2-semester "culture sequence" can replace the need for taking a foreign language. Although I've already taught this course as an upper level Honors course, I don't meet the new requirements of knowing the language, having a Masters in the field, or long immersion in the culture itself. Yes, yes, that would be swell--and I've unsuccessfully tried to get a visa to Iran (money more than politics involved), and have spent time in the U.A.E., and Bahrain, and Oman, and Yemen, and Turkey, and Tunsia, and Kuwait. But alas--not enough. I think my students lose out the most, and we certainly have some civic duty to help students be informed about people we have or may soon be bombing. I digress...

Sauer continues, "the principal training of the geographer should come, wherever possible, by doing field work," and then most appealing, suggests that letters from the field are something to appreciate--an art, an immediate link to the experience of place, and that "esthetic appreciation leads to philosophic speculation." We should invoke Shelley, and a few others, who have always known that poetry lies at the base of all fields of knowledge. Besides, I still write letters, depend on the physical act of writing with a pen which captures experience at a different level.

Sauer: "It is one of our oldest traditions to start by observing the near scenes; it is equally in the great tradition that the journeyman goes forth alone to far and strange places to become a participant observer of an unknown land and life."

Sauer's big finish:

We are aware that what we do will determine for good or evil the life of those
who will come after us. And therefore we geographers, least of all, can fail to
think on the place of ma in nature, of the whole of ecology. Man's intervention
in and disturbance of the organic and inorganic world has become so accelerated
that we may be tempted to escape fro the present into a future in which
technology has master over all matter, and thus promises forgiveness and
redemption. But will it? The moralist lives apart fro the quotations of the
market place and his thoughts are of other values.

book of essays

other lectures