EcoLit 313

Originally, my intention was to write two separate posts; one about the Morris Wood’s experience and one about what I would have said if I were in class today based on to the course notes. However, after I wrote both posts, I found that the two were inseparable and ended up combining them together.

On Morris Woods and Carmen Papalia:

It was weird to be reminded of how dependent I am on my sight; to the point where I couldn’t figure out how to move my body. I kept feeling like my brain knew what I was supposed to be doing but my leg and hand movement seemed outside of my control; even standing up straight seemed like a particularly difficult task. When I finally took off the blindfold to find my tree, I realized that I had been so busy just trying to figure out how to move my legs forward that I hadn’t been paying as much attention my physical surroundings while Emma was trying to lead me. I also realized later when we met as a group that it seemed like the other pairs had been very careful to lead their partners as best as they possibly could; helping each other along the way. Emma and I actually did the opposite, doing our best to confuse each other further. We even went as far as spinning each other around so finding the right direction back was even more impossible.

 One main connection that I noticed between Monday’s class and my site sits are the presence of humans .We are on a college campus with a densely populated surrounding area, so we have no choice but to come in contact with other people. I’ve been thinking about are the subtle ways that humans have changed the landscape over the past few hundred years. They have build buildings, chopped down trees, planted trees, etc., and they have also influenced the spread of “invasive” species in Morris woods. This is something that I would not have even been aware of, had I not participated in the class. It’s interesting how something as seemingly “natural” as a wooded area, can actually be quite artificial, and greatly influenced by human actions. I feel similarly about the wildflower area. I think that I have the unconscious, and obviously erroneous idea that all plants that I see on campus somehow got there “naturally.” This circles back to the sticky question about what exactly “natural” means. For me, I think that “natural” signifies something that has been unaffected by human activities.

Another idea that I’ve been meditating on since Monday’s class is that of trust. The trust activity made an impression on me because not only did I feel like I really did “get to know my tree,” I was astounded at just how vulnerable I felt without my eyesight in the woods. I can’t imagine doing this trust activity in a more wild environment than Morris Woods. I think I would have been very apprehensive if I hadn’t known that people were just a few feet away.

An interesting paper (part 1 and part 2) was published yesterday in the journal Trends in Genetics by Gerald Crabtree that says humans are not as smart as we were thousands of years ago. With agriculture, cities, and less "survival of the fittest," deleterious mutations are surviving and being passed on, often combining with other mutations, producing cascading negative effects. 

Any thoughts on this? It seems in the last few thousand years that there have been some genius minds. But are they recognized because of our technological advances that allow us to spread ideas and cultivate theories? Were there super genius cavemen who just didn't have the advancements to be known today as pioneers of their time? I think its interesting to think of our external advancements as having potentially negative effects on what is going on internally. 

Earlier this semester, I had posted a short paragraph on "What boundaries?" in my Thoreauvian walk while comparing the implications of a wall separating the campus from "the rest of the world." Essentially, I came to the conclusion that these physical, "man-made" boundaries do little to separate "bryn mawr" from the rest of the world. Our world is not entirely physical - it is also energetic, interconnected, cyclic, and continually transforming. This idea of separation of physical, "man-made" boundaries in relation to the Earth is further expanded upon by both Waring and Laduke in their respective writings.

Waring writes in Counting for Nothing, "One of the things that nature could demonstrate was that it didn't know anything about nation-state boundaries...When the ocean was demarcated into 200-mile economic zones and fishing quotas, did cod carry passports to indicate that they belonged to North America or Scandinavia?"

Indeed man-made nation-state boundaries come in very handy during times of war, economic interaction, and for statistics of measurement (i.e. GDP, child mortality, HIV infliction rate, life expectancy - see www.gapminder.org) requiring distinct separation of pieces of land into their relative nations and governments. However, they do not come in handy during times in which a different worldview is absolutely required - such as during honest acknowledgement of the environmental circumstance at hand.   

To stay or not to stay? I’ve been thinking a lot about where I want to sit to observe. This past weekend, when I was reading about Bryn Mawr from a book by Helen Horowitz, I was really struck by a chapter she had about tradition and the campus, where she talked about the way women related to their physical campus because of the traditions they had in different spaces on that campus. The more I thought about it, I liked the idea of doing a series of posts about a couple different physical places on campus outside that related either to my collective or individual memories of traditions at Bryn Mawr. I wanted to see how traditions and memory made a difference in the place you observe. For this particular post, I chose the cloisters.

Once again, I found myself this week struggling to do something new with my posting. This time, though, instead of passively waiting at the water's edge, sitting to see what would come to me, i decided to be a little more proactive. Theoretically, one should be able to walk the circumferance of a pond. That's what a pond is, afterall- a circualr body of water contained in a small space. But as I attempted to do this I encountered several obstacles, many of which entranced me, making the struggle worthwhile. 

I showed up, and before beginning to walk to my predesignated spot, I realized I had an oppurtunity to view the water as I had never had before. The storm had pushed much of the surrouding palntlife out of the way, making the water much more visable. I started circling the pond, coming to a tiny bank accross from an obviously man-mad shore of conrete and stones. The amount of water separating me fromt he opposing shore was miniscule. Had I been wearing big rain boots, I could have splashed right through it. In order to get to that bank, my new mission, I had to go all the way around, a proces which involved exssting through the gap in the fence, crashing through dry, overgrown wildlife, climbing over the fence, and carefully navigating down a tricky hill. 

The first half of my hour of observation felt like a very standard observation period for me. I noticed it was windier, slightly colder, how the tree’s had lost even more of their leaves (not only could I now see the Nature Trail but I could see all the way through the trains along the Haverford Road to the golf course on the other side of the R-100 line),the diminishing animal life (excluding dogs being walked), and how the nature trail was starting to resemble a trail in a forest (with all the leaves covering it) rather than one on a college campus. Sitting on the bench , and making what I saw as my rather standard observations, I began to get bored and started to wonder if I could actually observe something new. Sure unlike in the previous weeks the weather was less turbulent, and the cold and wind weren’t bothering me that much (showing that I was at least becoming more adapted to the seasonal transition) so there was that. Still wanting something more exciting to observed as well as a change of pace, I finally figured out how I was going to mix things up. I decided…. to stand up from the bench and walk around a little bit.

After several weeks of waking up at 7am only to find it darker than I would like for my site (or "sight") sit, today revealed the effects of falling back last weekend. The difference in light, combined with our recent LaDuke readings, made me think back to a storytelling gathering I went to at the United Indians Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Seattle…

How Raven Brought Light to the World

Raven was a shapeshifter. Like magic he could turn himself into a man from a bird and back again. Long ago there was a selfish Chief who lived alone with his daughter. The Chief was the guardian of all the light in the world, but loved only his daughter and so kept all of the light in the world hidden away. 

Now Raven was very tired of always bumping into things and seeing all the people on the Earth cold, so he turned himself into a white bird and so pleased the Chief’s daughter that he was invited into the longhouse. When Raven saw all of the light inside of the Chief’s longhouse he stole the light and flew through the smoke hole into the sky. He hung the sun high up in the sky. It was so bright that he could fly far far away, across from the sun, and hang up the moon and scatter the stars in the sky. Raven still had fire left, so he flew back down to Earth with the stick of fire in his beak. When he got closer to the Earth he dropped the burning stick on the rocks for the people there. That is why now when you strike two stones together, fire comes out.