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The Five Qualities

Andrea Wulf concludes her magnificent biography of Alexander von Humboldt by emphasizing his singular contribution to environmental learning: “we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination.” For Humboldt, “the imagination soothed the deep wounds that reason created.” Humboldt’s active imagination was stimulated by his extraordinary observational powers, his ability to synthesize information, his interpretive originality, his dynamic expressive approaches, and their manifestation as exemplified by both his scientific work and his outspoken critiques of colonialism and slavery. What is the 21st century version of this sequence—observation, information, interpretation, expression, manifestation?

In a previous essay, The Anthropocene Curriculum, I explore how Humboldt’s vision and his emphasis on the imagination provides inspiration for a 21st century approach to environmental learning. I outline a template for curricular design potentials covering Biosphere Studies, Urban Environments, The Ecological Imagination, Social Networking and Change Management, and Sustainability Life Skills. I’d like to propose a parallel template, but this time emphasizing the conceptual learning pathways, or qualities, that contribute to environmental learning.

I describe these learning pathways as qualities because they represent distinctive attributes. Each quality entails intrinsic learning processes. All of the qualities and learning processes are simultaneously enfolding and unfolding. They encompass each other while they reveal deepening insights. These qualities are interconnected and mutually reinforcing.

This is not an empirical theory, but rather an informal template, based on four decades of teaching and thinking about environmental learning. I offer this approach in the spirit of educational experimentation and improvisation. There are multiple ways to arrange these qualities. Nevertheless, I present them with some predispositions.

First, I’m intrigued by the dialectic between perennial qualities and adaptive considerations. A perennial quality represents an educational virtue that is consistent across cultural place and time. Environmental insights emerge in similar ways in a variety of cultural settings. Yet the context of learning is never the same. People, cultures, and organisms respond to changing circumstances. Hence learning is also adaptive. In the first decades of the 21st century, dynamic environmental change and the acceleration of information technologies are the context for adaptive learning.

Second, I don’t think educators spend sufficient time considering how people learn, especially in higher education. Most curricular controversies are substantive. How you learn is as important as what you learn. The skills of lifelong learning are typically internalized when you learn how to learn, and these skills receive insufficient reflective attention.

Third, ecological thinking embodies a paradigmatic shift in how we think about learning. That shift transcends interdisciplinarity per se. It assumes innovative approaches to how we engage as learning organisms in complex environments, how we see ourselves in the biosphere, and how we expand our concepts of place and time.

Fourth, I conceive organizational schemes as mandala sand paintings. You create a temporary order of symmetry, coherence, pattern, and meaning, and then you let it all dissipate and recreate it as necessary. Learning is a reflective blend of structure and improvisation, pattern and chaos, coherence and dissonance.

Fifth, the best way to think about any organizational scheme is to personalize it, using it as a way to explore how you learn, how you observe the way others learn, and by considering how learning is a reciprocal relationship between the self, culture, and the environment.

I encourage you to experiment with these qualities and rearrange them to suit your own purposes.

And now for the five qualities:

Observation

Observation emphasizes a broadened understanding of biosphere patterns, including the ability to design learning activities and research approaches that enhance perception of global environmental change, an understanding of the relationship between local and global, and the ability to move between spatial and temporal scales. Observation entails perception, identification, and pattern recognition. Perception is the development of sensory awareness, so as to apprehend movement, metabolism, pace and behavior. Identification allows an individual to enter the lifeworld (umwelt) of other organisms. Pattern Recognition is the ability to assimilate perception and identification by using scale to detect symmetry, cycles, waves, thresholds, interstices, flows, and species interactions. For a comprehensive discussion of these issues, and for specific examples from the field of ecology, please see Rafe Sagarin and Anibel Pauchard, Observation and Ecology.

Information

Information describes the ability to gather data from a variety of sources, organize that data, assess its relevance and application, and understand how to use it effectively. Information entails sourcing, browsing, and networking. Sourcing involves understanding the origins of information, its dissemination, its transformation, and how it is manipulated or translated based on opinion and perspective. Browsing involves the survey of information, including scanning (seeing the breadth of the field), scaling (understanding its context), focus (knowing how to look more deeply), and granularity (finding its constituent pieces). Networking entails mapping information, tracing its routes and paths, determining its speed of transmission (mobility), and understanding who has access to it. An interesting way to conceive of information, and an approach that is facilitated by computer graphics, is the emerging field of information design and visualization. Information design uses the above concepts and develops visualization processes to enhance our understanding of them.

Interpretation

Interpretation is the challenge of generating meaning from observation and information. This includes constructing narrative, amplifying and articulating personal voice, and developing themes and approaches for communicating complex environmental issues. Interpretation entails synthesis, dissonance, and narrative. Synthesis is the ability to find coherent relationships within diverse fields of information while finding the essence of ideas and explanations. Dissonance reflects the tensions inherent in synthesis, the recognition of nonlinearity, different perspectives, and contrasting possibilities. Narrative is the ability to create arcs of unfolding meaning, embodying both synthesis and dissonance through the use of allegory, metaphor, and story. In the 21st century, electronic communications make new forms of narrative available and novel forms of expression possible, including the use of diverse media, and reliance on iconography, design, and virtual/visceral matrices, demanding innovative approaches to interpretation.

Expression

Expression is the ability to effectively communicate interpretive approaches by cultivating creative possibilities in venues such as storytelling and eloquence, writing and personal reflection, information design and display, artistic mapping, public art, soundscape design, animation and video, music and dance performance, game design, and other forms of iconography and representation. Expression entails imagination, improvisation, and activation. Imagination is a unique blend of creativity, visualization, and reflection, allowing the mind to form uninhibited images and possibilities by exploring the unconscious, and melding psyche with the biosphere. Improvisation is the ability to spontaneously respond to dynamic changes in the environment by adapting structures of knowledge to new contingencies, or playing with forms and ideas as they emerge. Activation is the application of imagination and improvisation through experimentation, innovation, and implementation. Electronic communications enable a spontaneity of response that can have wide (but not necessarily deep) impact in a short period of time. How can expression be simultaneously deep and wide, perennial and adaptive, structured and improvisational, active and reflective?

Manifestation

Manifestation refers to the generosity of interpretation and expression, applying narrative forms to enhance human flourishing in the biosphere. This includes an understanding of social and emotional intelligence, interspecies empathy, the ability to form collaborative connections and challenging learning communities in multiple cultural settings, the ability to engage in creative conflict, and the awareness to improvise in and adapt to diverse learning venues. Manifestation entails generosity, posterity, and flourishing. Generosity is the ability to demonstrate kindness, compassion, and respect in service to cultural community and ecosystem integrity. It encourages empathy, dialogue, connectedness, and love. Posterity requires awareness of past and future generations, the ability to act with respect for legacy and outcome, and to do so with an expansive time scale. If we combine posterity and empathy, we consider our actions in all of these contexts—intergenerational, multicultural, inter-species, urban/rural, local/global, and cosmopolitan. Flourishing is the ultimate goal of environmental learning, to create settings that allow for optimal human thriving in the dynamic biosphere. Flourishing promotes pleasure, virtue, equity, opportunity, collaboration, community, restoration, and reciprocation.

I realize this is a hefty list. Any of these qualities require elaboration and specification. They are most useful when placed in a substantive context. For example, these qualities can be neatly juxtaposed with the five curricular design potentials listed above. I’ll do so now:

Curricular Design Potentials: Biosphere Studies, Urban Environments, The Ecological Imagination, Social Networking and Change Management, Sustainability Life Skills.

The Five Qualities: Observation (Perception, Identification, Pattern Recognition), Information (Sourcing, Browsing, Networking), Interpretation (Synthesis, Dissonance, Narrative), Expression (Imagination, Improvisation, Activation), Manifestation (Generosity, Posterity, Flourishing).

It’s also helpful to juxtapose the curricular design potentials and the five qualities with the “new professions” I previously described—social entrepreneurs, media innovators, information analysts, infographic consultants, game designers, computer networkers, curators, graphic facilitators, planners, healing professionals, green retailers and marketers, street artists and performers, digital artists and photographers, and bloggers.

How do all of these possibilities help us conceive a new generation of environmental learning venues? What is the role of colleges and universities in taking bold educational initiatives? What support do we provide students, faculty, and administrators? How can trustees and other stakeholders be included in these initiatives? And how do we work with communities to better understand the dynamic environmental and conceptual changes of the Anthropocene?

In my next columns, I’ll move away from these abstract formulations, and provide some examples of on-the-ground projects, both in the classroom and in the community, that combine vision and practice and offer hope and solutions.

 

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The Purple Crayon and The Fog Man

As a way to introduce my thinking about environmental learning, I’d like to share some of my most vivid childhood experiences. When I was five years old, my parents took me to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. I was thrilled, daunted, overwhelmed, and inspired by the virtual trip into outer space. For a souvenir I asked if I could bring home Herbert Zim’s Golden Guide to the Stars. I spent hours flipping through that book. It taught me about scale, space, time, and all the possibilities on my horizon. It instilled a sense of wonder. It helped me locate the Earth. I realized that I lived on a planet!

I had another favorite book as well. I loved Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. As Harold wandered off to sleep he floated wherever his imagination would take him. His magic crayon enabled him to draw his reality. When he got lost and overwhelmed by the prospects of his imagination, he could find his way home by drawing the moon outside his bedroom window. His home place gave him the courage to explore the farther reaches of his imagination. I learned about the boundaries of home, and how I could use my imagination to travel through space and time.

Both books taught me a great deal (even as a five year old) about scale and the imagination. They also provided a glimpse into the wonderful world of books. To this day, I can endlessly wander through stacks of books, browsing their contents, synthesizing their meaning, exploring the various paths to insight and understanding. Over 60 years later I get immense pleasure from browsing my own library, an intellectual archive of my dreams, hopes, and aspirations. I savor the extraordinary variety of ideas sitting on those shelves. I get similar pleasure from browsing through other people’s libraries, glimpsing aspects of their intellectual lives.

At a young age, I learned to love the newspaper. I started with the sports page. It connected me to baseball games played in distant cities. I then migrated to the international news. As I got older I explored all of the other features of the paper. I learned how to scan the paper for stories of interest, and how to read between the lines. I began to understand that what wasn’t reported was also of importance. The daily newspaper taught me how to browse, surf, synthesize and interpret information.

Sixty years later, I still wander through the morning news, but now I do so by visiting various websites or discussion forums. The speed and access of my approach is greatly accelerated, but the basic principles of browsing, synthesizing, and curating is strikingly similar to the habits I learned reading the daily newspaper as a child.

There’s another great way to start the day and that is to observe the natural world. Many years later (the 1990s), I discovered a lovely essay, “Readings for Morning” by Joseph W. Meeker, the opening piece in his delightful book, Minding the Earth. Meeker suggests that “[i]t is too much to say that you are what you read in the morning, but it is a sure bet that you aren’t what you don’t. . . . It is worthwhile to pause for a moment and reflect upon the character of the Morning Reading pursued by each of us. . . . A good day in the life of a living system begins with recognition and affirmation of life.” Meeker reiterated the necessity of observational ecology as an educational practice.  

I have a darker memory, too. It started as a frolic but ended as a headache. In the 1950s, our suburban community regularly sprayed DDT in the neighborhood. A man would come in a small jeep and dispense a cloud of chemicals, resembling a misty fog. We called him “the fog man.” I remember running through “the fog,” delighted that I had access to the same clouds I observed in the sky. I soon realized that these fog adventures would typically result in a headache, and from then on I stayed away. In my adult years, as a 39-year-old and then more recently, I’ve had cancerous but encapsulated tumors removed from my body. I often wonder whether “the fog man” seeded these mutations. This experience taught me about cognitive dissonance.

In retrospect, some of my environmental learning came from listening to the stories of my parents and grandparents. My mother was born on a farm in Cyprus, a Jewish family that fled pogroms in Russia, only to be initially denied access to America. The family emigrated again when she was nine years old, arriving at a cold water flat in Brooklyn. My mother spoke three languages, but not English. She and my grandfather would tell stories of how much they enjoyed the farm, and how difficult it was to emigrate, even though they knew it would bring more opportunities for the family. I learned about migration, diaspora, and the importance of intergenerational experience. It’s a long way from a farm in Cyprus to the Hayden Planetarium and the Fog Man, but these memories help me understand how I came to learn about the natural world. They influenced my career as an environmental educator. I’ve used them as templates for dozens of teaching activities.

I’ll conclude this brief snapshot of vivid learning moments for now, although I would also like to stress that I could cite dozens of additional incidents and memories, and they would reveal many other forms of participation and engagement. And I know that you can, too! It’s instructive to trace how you learn through a lifetime, to see what’s changed, and to observe that the essence of how you learn is both perennial and adaptive. Harold and the Purple Crayon is just as meaningful today as it was in 1955. Yet I’m aware, too, that in these times, Harold is as likely to take his journey with an iPad app or a YouTube video.  

There is a perennial quality to these anecdotes. You can also travel through space and time, or learn about scale and perception by reading Rumi’s poetry. Artists, visionaries, mystics, and scientists use the imagination to explore scale. Harold just happened to use a purple crayon. And the dark shadow of the Fog Man lies close to so many communities. Consider London’s famous polluting fogs and all of the health damage they caused. For countless generations, families have told origin stories that help them understand where they come from and where they are going. There are extraordinary environmental narratives layered in those stories.

What I wish to convey is that how we engage in learning has a perennial substrate, both through the ages and over the course of a lifetime. Yet it’s essential to pay attention to the adaptive qualities of an active mind. The context and milieu of environmental learning is always changing. For example, shiny new technologies easily take over our lives, and in so doing they alter how we observe and what we perceive. Can we be mindful of how these technologies influence how we learn, and then how we interpret what we observe? I believe there is a somatic and evolutionary substrate that informs sensory perception, structures our imaginative capacities, and enables us to form concepts and ideas. How is that substrate enhanced or diminished in different learning environments? This is my overriding concern as I consider learning pathways intrinsic to the Anthropocene. How do we navigate the shifting templates of dynamic change and what are the conceptual pathways that best inform environmental learning?

Sherry Turkle’s most recent book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, explores how social media is dramatically changing the very essence of how people engage in conversations. For example, when texting is ubiquitous, protocols emerge as to when it’s appropriate to make eye contact, how you divide your attention between virtual and visceral conversations, and how social bonding is both enhanced and diminished. This is just one example of countless studies that document how social media and other communication technologies significantly change how we think and learn. These technologies and their applications change so quickly that it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapidly evolving protocols, let alone the changing conceptual dimensions of their use. In my view, the field is moving so quickly that we still don’t understand the long-term implications of social media, and I’m wary of trendy prognostications and catchy metaphors. Moreover, much of the research is culturally specific and based on relatively affluent users. 

However, just as the Anthropocene reflects accelerating environmental change, the same technological capacities that enable those changes are accompanied by accelerating conceptual changes. The challenge for environmental learning is how to understand the implications of both dynamic processes—environmental change has conceptual implications, and thus informs how we learn about the biosphere. I have written about this parallel process in Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change (The MIT Press, 2001). For example, I consider how the technologies of speed (both the Internet and the Interstate) dramatically alter how we perceive environmental change—pace is intrinsic to perception.

What’s the relationship between Harold’s purple crayon, the Fog Man, my mother’s emigration, and the accelerating technological changes of the Anthropocene? I think the best way to formulate an educational strategy is to carefully reflect on your own experience as a learner. There are many paths to environmental learning, depending on your age, your culture, your background, and your values. This includes varieties of developmental sequences, cognitive abilities, and multiple intelligences. Your path is an educational narrative, one strand in a collective narrative that yields more generalized insights. The very best educational approaches and curriculum find ways to weave between individual and collective experience, while also paying attention to what’s perennial and adaptive.

In the next section, I’ll propose a conceptual sequence for environmental learning in the Anthropocene. Similar to the adaptive curriculum I proposed in a previous column, this sequence is meant to be evocative, unfolding, and versatile, reflecting the fast-paced changes of our contemporary milieu. My hope is that this sequence will serve as a template for new approaches to educational delivery and assessment.

 

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The Future of Environmental Learning (Part Three): An Adaptive Curriculum

adapative-curriculum.jpg

In her remarkably informative and pertinent biography of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf explains how Humboldt “plaited together the cultural, biological, and physical world, and painted a picture of global patterns.” Over two hundred years ago, Humboldt’s effusive, prolific, and ambitious global explorations established the intellectual foundations ofenvironmental change science. His multivolume work Cosmos inspired Darwin, Thoreau, and Emerson, as well as an entire generation of natural philosophers and emerging scientists. Humboldt emphasized the importance of comparative natural history, the integration of imagination with rational thought, the relationship between environmental exploitation and social justice, the necessity of networking and collaboration, and the sheer wonder of scientific and artistic exploration.

The boldness of Humboldt’s pioneering vision serves as an educational foundation and guide for environmental learning in the Anthropocene. I derive both inspiration and reassurance knowing that an ecologically oriented, discovery-based, imagination-fueled approach to learning has a two hundred year legacy. Just as Humboldt was an educational innovator so many years ago, we have to be correspondingly bold in our curricular objectives. How can we build on Humboldt’s vision given all the extraordinary conceptual tools available in the twenty-first century?

I’d like to address this question in two ways. First, I’ll provide a generalized template for the substantive curriculum that should inform environmental learning. Second, and in a subsequent column, I’ll explore some of the “learning pathways” that are emerging as essential conceptualizations in an era of big data, social media, and surplus information. These approaches are complementary. The knowledge base of a curriculum should never be separated from the teaching and learning process. Indeed, they inform each other.

Before I proceed, I’d like to offer some comments from practical experience. As a former college president, and as a sustainability consultant to many colleges and universities, I am acutely aware of how hard it is to promote, design, and implement transformational curricular change. The faculty steward the curriculum. More often than not, they have strong opinions based on their disciplinary bias and research orientation. Administrators often present their own conservative biases, usually informed by multiple stakeholder concerns, donor considerations, financial issues, or political contingencies. Most educational institutions have elaborate protocols and procedures for curricular innovation, and they tend to favor incremental change and the status quo. Since the late 1960’s very few institutions have been able to implement systemic curricular change. Of course there are exceptions (Arizona State University comes to mind), but they are always controversial and easily subverted by the risk averse.

Perhaps the pervading turbulence in higher education—from questions of accountability to relevance to cost—will provide a catalyst for systemic curricular change. It seems to me there are three generalized responses to this turbulence. One is to administer financial cutbacks and administrative efficiencies. A second is to try to find additional revenue to support the status quo. A third is to transform the institution with new programs, delivery models, and revenue streams. Some institutions try all three of these approaches. That can be very confusing! In my view, colleges and universities that promote visionary, imaginative, yet practical, and career-oriented programs will best survive these turbulent years.

If you’re reading this, and you work in an environmental-related field at a college or university, you have an opportunity. You won’t be able to transform the curriculum unless you make a conscious choice to do so. That choice will require time, perseverance, commitment, vision, and creativity. Whether you’re a student, a faculty member, a dean, or serve in some other function, you will only transform the curriculum if you take the responsibility for helping to implement the change.

Curriculum development is a dynamic, situational, and participatory process. That’s why so many curricular efforts repeat themselves. We often hear about the inefficiencies of “reinventing the wheel” when it comes to curriculum. It is obviously useful to be aware of what others are doing, and to be inspired by great ideas. As stewards of the curriculum, most faculties aspire to incorporate their expertise and values as essential to the teaching and learning process. Hence there are many “home-grown”curricular efforts that are inherently subject to compromise. That is why I am proposing adaptive curricular guidelines that may be relevant in diverse institutional settings, acknowledging, too, the rapidly changing external environment that brings new knowledge and situations to bear on academic preparation.

I propose five broad categories as a curricular foundation: biosphere studies, urban environments, the ecological imagination, sustainability like skills, and social networking and change management. These are mutually reinforcing and reciprocal categories. For each foundation I’ll briefly present a core learning process, distinguish a personal and public dimension, and then suggest some areas for substantive inquiry and experimentation. Consider these suggestions as a catalog of emerging curricular design potentials, to serve as a basis for dozens of possibilities.

Biosphere studies emphasize an understanding of scale, learning how to interpret spatial and temporal variability, linked to the dynamics of biospheric processes and local ecological observations. The challenge is to develop a conceptual sequence that helps students perceive, recognize, classify, detect, and interpret biospheric patterns, what I’ll describe as “pattern-based environmental learning.” The purpose is to better understand and internalize global environmental change. The personal dimension involves the development of natural history observation skills so as to enhance appreciation of home and habitat. The public dimension involves how to contribute those observations and assessments to global networks of biospheric data collection. Examples for study may include bioregional natural history, biogeochemical cycles, atmospheric and oceanic circulations, evolutionary ecology, restoration ecology, the movement of people and species, watersheds and fluvial geomorphology, biogeographical change (species migrations, radiations, and convergences), plate tectonics, and climate change. 

Urban Environments integrates the ecological dynamics and footprints of cities with the political economy of globalization, urbanization, and municipal organization. The personal dimension involves understanding cities as networks of community life, multicultural and multigenerational diversity, concentrated dwelling spaces, hubs of innovation and knowledge generation, centers of regional and international commerce and exchange, while exploring the ecological context for those activities. The public dimension involves understanding the design, organization, governance and nature of cities, their impact on the biosphere, their metabolic and microbial flows, and how community networks can enhance social justice, economic equity, resilience, and a sustainable material life. Examples for study include ecological urbanism, globalization and the city, cosmopolitan cultures, urban design and sustainability, urban metabolism, resilience studies, innovation and knowledge diffusion, and cities in space and time.

The Ecological Imagination entails the cultivation of an aesthetic voice, personal expression, and improvisational excellence to enhance the arts, music, dance, play, literary narrative, and philosophical inquiry. The personal dimension emphasizes how to use the creative process as a means to explore questions of ethics, meaning, and purpose, how to maximize aesthetic joy, and how to express emotional responses to challenging environmental issues.  The public dimension develops the capacity for collective expression in social milieus—how to use public spaces such as buildings, parks, campuses, etc to promote learning about sustainability and environmental issues. Examples for study include environmental art and music, acoustic ecology and sound design, biophilic design and architecture, environmental interpretation, environmental perception, environmental ethics, ecological identity, the aesthetics and epistemology of patterns, game design, information design, and biomimcry.

Sustainability Life Skills is the application of sustainability principles to the routines, behaviors, and practices of everyday life. The personal dimension involves the individual behaviors of sustenance, shelter, transportation, health and domestic life. Further, it emphasizes how to incorporate sustainability principles into one’s career and professional choices. The public dimension involves how to support organizational or regional sustainability efforts, including procurement, ecological cost accounting, recycling, health services, and/or other forms of community capacity building for sustainability. Examples for study include organic agriculture, nutrition, home building and engineering, construction, alternative energy, energy and water conservation, alternative transportation, sustainability metrics, habitat restoration, gardening, urban and regional planning, career development, reflective practice, and service learning.

Social Networking and Change Management describes how to enhance, cultivate, and utilize social capital. This includes a personal dimension—providing students with the ability to better understand how they learn and think, how they respond to stress, and how to maximize psychological and physical wellness. The public dimension promotes the ability to interpret collective behavior in organizational settings. The learning process involves how to integrate the personal and social dimension so as to maximize human flourishing in diverse institutional settings. Examples for study include cognitive theory, neuropsychology, organizational process, change management, behavioral economics, ecological economics, social entrepreneurship, decision-making science, adaptive management, and social networking theory.

In Northfield, Massachusetts, the independent Northfield-Mount Hermon school once had two beautiful sprawling campuses, one on each side of the Connecticut River.  Some years ago they decided to move all functions to the Mount Hermon campus. The campus on the Northfield side is essentially mothballed. I’ve often thought about how exciting it would be to use that campus to design a brand new college, one based on the subject matter described above. Students and faculty would turn the campus into an exemplary sustainable facility, using the Anthropocene curriculum as a guide.

Now that I spend much of the year in Seattle, I often walk past the campus of Antioch University. The building was recently sold as it represents prime downtown real estate. Antioch will move elsewhere, a few blocks away. But I think about what it would mean to repurpose and retrofit the current building and turn it into a new college with an Anthropocene curriculum. How would the Seattle campus and the Northfield campus be both similar and different? Perhaps we need dozens of new schools, colleges, and universities, at all levels of education, designed by the prospective participants, uniquely configured to take on the environmental challenges of the forthcoming century. What can be more important than such an educational project? How can you stimulate this kind of thinking where you live and work? Is there a reasonable scale for attempting this approach?

While you think about these options and possibilities, remember, too, that the Anthropocene demands new learning concepts and pathways as well as substantive knowledge. In the next column I’ll look at these approaches, including scale, patterns, metabolism, networks, perception, design, improvisation, iconography, and imagination. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a quote from Steven Johnson’s fine book, Where Good Ideas Come From. “Unusually generative environments display similar patterns of creativity at multiple scales simultaneously.”

 

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Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene (Part Two)

The Whole Earth Catalog was inspiring for many reasons. It made me aware of a huge talent pool of people who could be mobilized to live a more creative, wholesome, and responsible life. So many decades ago, the sections of the original book—understanding whole systems, shelter and land use, industry and craft, communications, community, nomadics, and learning—served as both a curriculum and a vision for a parallel catalog of new professions. Whether it was software engineering, community activism, sustainable design, or management consulting—a close look at the Whole Earth Catalog reveals dozens of ideas for new professional identities and categories. The classic Whole Earth back cover aphorism was “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” But you could also interpret that as: “Use your talent wisely and well. It’s needed. Be imaginative. Improvise and take risks.”

I have a hunch. I believe there is a vast talent pool of people, many of whom are between 25-40 years old who are engaged in the equivalent “new professions” of 2015. These are creative, motivated, independent, and flexible people who care deeply about “the fate of the planet” but don’t have the venue for expressing their concerns or lending their voice to problem-solving solutions. Here’s a preliminary list of these emergent 2015 professional identities and categories—social entrepreneurs, media innovators, information analysts, infographic consultants, game designers, computer networkers, curators, graphic facilitators, planners, healing professionals, green retailers and marketers, street artists and performers, digital artists and photographers, and bloggers.

I am curious about people who are not intrinsically drawn to the environmental and sustainability fields but nevertheless are concerned about those issues. I am not describing the sustainability professional or environmental activist. They have already made their professional choices. We need to attract people in professions that may not be ostensibly environmental, but who can lend their expertise and imagination to how we perceive global environmental challenges, and who can design clever, resilient, and unlikely solutions.

On Super Bowl Sunday, if you take the time to watch the game, beyond all of the hoopla and hype, there is another show, too—all of the new, flashy, sparkly, speedy commercials. Forget for a moment the values they promote, the products they sell, and the lifestyle they espouse, however attracted or repulsed you might be. Consider instead the thousands of hours of creativity and craft that go into the production of those commercials. Talented and imaginative women and men are working on these ads.

For much of the year I live in a boutique “green apartment” building in “hip” Belltown, a few blocks north of downtown Seattle. Most of the apartment residents are in that 25-40 year old age group. They work for Amazon or Microsoft, or they work independently as graphic designers, website builders, computer programmers, or any of the professions I list above. Some of them take long “recreational” trips in between professional opportunities. One fellow works at a local bank so he can support his aspiration as a writer. A woman I know is pursuing joint degrees in health infomatics and business. Another young man works at ZipCar. A younger friend teaches band at a local middle school so he can support his main professional aspiration of becoming a game designer. My next-door neighbor is a fashion blogger. And it’s not just these well-educated people. Spend some time in Seattle’s lower income Central District and speak to people who work in the schools, NGO’s, and community centers. Speak to street artists and musicians. You’ll be blown away by the extraordinary talent and vision.

I’m a chatty guy and I like to talk to these folks. What matters to them? Why do they do what they do? What are their aspirations? Just a few minutes of conversation with them and it’s clear that they are talented, motivated, and interesting people. I am convinced that almost all of the people I speak with genuinely care about the same environmental issues that concern me, but they are unlikely to become engaged with those issues because they lack venues for doing so. For the most part, they aren’t going to join a march, or get politically engaged. Maybe they will try to live more sustainable lives, but it’s not necessarily a priority, like it is for the environmentally converted.

I’ve spent over four decades in the environmental field. I’ve worked with hundreds of mission-driven, sincere, hard working professionals. Like all mission-driven projects, there’s an implicit assumption that we have to recruit more people to our cause. If they know what we know, they will be as concerned as we are. Let’s grow awareness so as to promote more effective action. It’s an obvious logic model for environmental activism. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really worked. Why? Broadening awareness of global environmental change takes time. It requires reflection, imagination, deliberation, and experience. It’s not a conversion experience, although some will explain it that way. It’s not an awareness that emerges from a single exposure, or an outrageous transgression, although it can happen that way. It’s a slower, cumulative, cultural process.

I don’t want to recruit a brilliant advertising person to develop the environmental ad of the decade. Or convince a brilliant marketing analyst to prepare a marketing campaign for broadening awareness of endangered species. Such projects may have short-term effectiveness. You might be able to sell a car that way, or a pair of sneakers, or even a president. But you won’t influence deeper values. And you certainly won’t build awareness of a challenge as complicated as the biosphere and global environmental change.

Rather I’m hoping to organize a riveting, reciprocal, informative learning process. I would like to mobilize the vast talent pool of innovative, creative professionals. More importantly I want to know what they’re thinking. I want to understand their motivations, aspirations, and concerns. I’d like to better understand the kind of world they want to live in today, tomorrow, and twenty-five years in the future. I want to know how they intend to get there. I want to ask them questions that they aren’t often asked—questions about meaning, purpose, and right livelihood. Who are you? What matters to you? Where is your path taking you? How can we work together? I envision a multigenerational, multicultural, multidisciplinary group of learning professionals, who want to shape the world by cultivating their ecological awareness, as linked to the other priorities of their lives and times. 

Just as the environmental profession invented itself over the last four decades, it must adapt to a dramatically new workplace environment. Glance through this infographic compiled by Russ Dawson (www.russdawson.com).

Do our environmental studies programs help students understand this shifting workplace? Or for that matter are these dynamics covered as crucial curricular foundations for liberal arts programs? Typically not. Yet today’s students probably won’t maximize their success unless they understand where they fit in this matrix. The successful professionals I refer to above mainly figure this out independently. They find ways to see themselves outside of the traditional workplace. They reinvent their professional identities accordingly.

So what does all of this have to do with environmental learning in the Anthropocene? I’d like to stress three ideas for further conversation. First, environmental learning must involve a wide range of professional pathways engaging the future of work, multiple stakeholders, and convergent interests. I envision global change scientists working with information graphics experts, game designers, or street artists. Consider conservation biologists working with social entrepreneurs, media innovators, and digital artists. Mix and match as you choose. But these combinations must be supported actively at all levels of schooling—from elementary education to graduate programs. Second, environmental learning must incorporate new cognitive orientations. All of the “new professions” are learning a great deal about multiple psychological dynamics—from decision-making behavior to attention and perception. This data, perhaps intended for proprietary purposes, such as consumer choice, also penetrates the realm of values and meaning. Sophisticated game designers, for example, have a profound understanding of how to engage people using all of their senses, developing strategic and improvisational thinking, collaboration and competition, visual and iconic aids, and immersive experiences. Third, environmental learning must conceive of innovative learning spaces. Educational institutions will always have a prominent role to play, but only the most innovative systems will be flexible enough to overhaul the curricular foundations of environmental programs. Where else can and should environmental learning occur, especially given the future of work diagram? We might prefer that no child is left inside, but for many children, outside is a city street. How can we mobilize zoos, aquariums, and museums to expand how they think about environmental learning? Are there workplace venues, media and virtual spaces, public festivals and gatherings, markets or sporting events where such learning might occur? And how do all three of these possibilities mutually reinforce each other—new professional pathways, cognitive and perceptual understanding, and innovative learning spaces? There are strategic “learning spaces” that may emerge beyond the boundaries of institutional education—places like museums, community centers, corporate forums, small business gatherings, civic meetings, street festivals. Perhaps the philanthropic community can seed public learning spaces that encourage creative collaborations in service of community, place, and ecological awareness.

I’m excited to see that some of these collaborations are beginning to occur. They often happen for serendipitous reasons—spatial proximity, freewheeling hubs, recreational associations, community gatherings, or virtual convergences. But how much more effective would these collaborations be if we seeded them in colleges and universities? What if Schools of Communication, for example, developed curricular and career approaches with Business Programs and Schools of the Environment? And what if you bring Art Colleges into the mix? There are dozens of interesting, topically rich, career-relevant combinations. Perhaps it’s time that we consider a grand overhaul of environmental programs as well. In the next installment, I’ll make some suggestions for what an ideal Anthropocene environmental learning curriculum might entail.

 

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Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene Part 1

Environmental Learning in the Anthropocene

See the full text of this article, along with illustrations from Jake Seven at:

www.terrain.org

Enivronmental-Learning.jpg

Since the days of The Whole Earth Catalog, circa 1969, in my formative late teen years, I’ve been concerned about the ecological fate of the planet. Anyone who was paying attention then could observe the daunting threats: changing oceanic and atmospheric circulations, altered biogeochemical cycles, species extinctions, declining biodiversity, and habitat degradation. All these decades later, many of the environmental concerns and challenges we recognized in that era remain unresolved. The scientific data is much more precise, our ability to monitor earth system changes is increasingly robust, and our understanding of the biosphere is more sophisticated. In 2015, climate change is a household word (if not a household concern), the sustainability movement has made great strides, and the global consequences of environmental change are much better (if still imperfectly) understood. 

In 1969 there weren’t any environmental studies programs that were named as such. You could study ecology or forestry, or approach the traditional disciplines with ecological topics in mind. Or you could enroll in a geography program, perhaps the most intriguing interdisciplinary approach to environmental issues. There was an entire generation of baby boomer students who were motivated to change all of that. Indeed, my entire career was oriented around developing, designing, and implementing various approaches to environmental studies. This was a generation-wide effort. The result is profound. We now have an international network of robust environmental studies programs at every conceivable educational level. These programs are further expanded with the emergence of sustainability as a rubric for considering human impact on the environment. 

Take a few minutes and think about all the words you can summon with green, eco, environmental or sustainable in the prefix. Whether it’s ecopsychology, environmental ethics, environmental economics, green business, sustainability science, ecological restoration—or whatever words and concepts you might conjure—few, if any of these subjects, appeared in the lexicon or as fitting educational subjects prior to 1970. The environmental literature is now profuse. We’ve come a long way conceptually and educationally. That’s a very good thing!

Yet still, environmental concerns are trumped by seemingly more pertinent issues—economic and social equity, health care, resurgent tribalism, violent conflict, global poverty, among many others, and the connections between these issues and the ecological fate of the planet are not easily perceived. What is the role of environmental studies in making those connections more clear?

Lately there has been much talk about the meaning of the Anthropocene, a dramatic concept suggesting that human impact on the earth is a significant enough biospheric and ecological dynamic so as to proclaim a new era on the geological time scale. Since Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist proposed this term, we’ve seen an engaging literature discussing the appropriateness, interpretation, and significance of this concept, including numerous books, websites, and even a journal (Anthropocene, published by Elsevier). Whatever the scientific merits of the term, like the equally evocative “Gaia” it is sufficiently controversial to generate interesting discussion and commentary. What I take from the concept is that the terms of how we conceive environmental learning are rapidly changing. Forty-five years have passed since the first publication of the Whole Earth catalog. How shall we conceive of environmental learning all these years later? And how can we build on some of the important concepts from the first phase of environmental studies—place-based learning, bioregionalism, wilderness conservation, ecological restoration, natural history education, environmental justice, ecological economics, global environmental governance—while we confront the Anthropocene reality?

I’ve been considering six dynamic challenges that must be incorporated, internalized, and activated to expand environmental learning—the urban planet, a cosmopolitan culture, ecological equity and social justice, the proliferation of information networks, virtual natural history, and synthetic biology. These are by no means inclusive categories. There are countless ways to think about environmental learning in the Anthropocene. In my view, environmental studies is necessarily adaptive and the conditions that inform its structure are always in flux. Let’s launch the conversation.

Page through any contemporary world atlas, or compare maps of the world from 1950 to the present, and you will observe an extraordinary planetary urbanization process. Widen the temporal spread slightly and you encounter a stunning statistic. In 1900, two out of every ten people lived in an urban area. By 2050, it’s projected that seven out of every ten people will be urban dwellers. To cite the title of Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything. Environmental studies must include urbanization as a critical informing dynamic. Accordingly programs in urban ecology, ecological urbanism, urban sustainability, among other configurations, are emerging. Blogs and websites such as The Nature of Cities (http://www.thenatureofcities.com), Next City (https://nextcity.org), 100 Resilient Cities (http://www.100resilientcities.org/blog#/-_/), The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (http://usdn.org/public/About-us.html) reflect an exciting proliferation of solution-based ideas and projects. Cities are centers of innovation and it is likely that the most groundbreaking ecological solutions will originate in urban systems. 

Planetary urbanization contributes to a vibrant cosmopolitan culture. Global cities include people from a great variety of cultural backgrounds. Some arrive there by virtue of choice and opportunity. Others arrive as a consequence of displacement—refugees from war, political upheaval, or environmental change, especially climate. Indeed, the unfortunate resurgence of anti-immigration sentiment is a reactionary, fear-based response to the inevitable planetary diaspora of people and species. Cultural diversity is parallel to biodiversity, and threats to both are equally challenging. How do people from different backgrounds learn, live, and work together? This challenge, too, should be fundamental to environmental learning in the Anthropocene.

Thomas Piketty’s great work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, develops the unassailable case that income inequality is a structural dysfunction of modern economies. The oligarchic concentration of wealth has huge implications for human flourishing, and important ramifications for natural resource distribution and ecological services. The term “ecological equity” brings attention to the connection between wealth inequality and the political economy of global environmental change. The advanced technologies and information networks of the Anthropocene have the potential to exacerbate wealth inequality or provide interesting new solutions for wealth sharing and creation.  Are there new approaches to both global environmental governance and local, bioregional politics that facilitate participation and engagement, and in so doing, bring the challenge of ecological equity to the foreground?

The proliferation of information networks continues unabated, bringing profound changes to how people and communities organize their lives. The dual promise of the “world wide web” provokes both excitement and ambivalence. Does it promote ubiquitous access to unlimited data or the end of privacy? The internet, computing, and social media create new templates for how people work, how they think, and how they perceive the biosphere. How does this impact environmental learning? Among other challenges, it means that there are entirely new professions that can potentially influence how we think about the environment and how to organize information and learning. Marshall McLuhan was correct. The very use of these “sensory enhancing” technologies radically changes human perception. 

Hence many people now learn about the biosphere through digital means. Such virtual learning is also a dual promise. On the one hand, environmental learning is enhanced by advanced instrumentation, allowing for the global exchange of data, spectacular imagery, and the ability to change perceptual scale through digitization techniques. Yet more screen time often sacrifices visceral apprehension, and interferes with the hands-on, place-based learning that has long been the foundation of environmental learning. Is there a useful blend of these learning venues? What is the role of environmental studies in navigating this boundary? 

Synthetic biology integrates genomic engineering, evolutionary biology and biodesign. Flip through the lavishly illustrated pages of Biodesign by William Myers and you’ll see the following topic headings: algal filter machine, bioencryption, aquadyne living wall, lung-on-a-chip, carnivorous domestic robots, among dozens more. Myers intends to portray the potential of ecologically-based solutions to a wide range of issues, including medical microbiology, materials design, urban planning, and ecological engineering. The various illustrations are alternately inspiring and grotesque, natural and alien, appealing and disconcerting. In Regenesis, George Church and Ed Regis explore how synthetic biology is intrinsic to the history of life on earth, and it opens a new dimension in planetary evolution. By what basis will consumers, producers, and regulators, make sense of these possibilities? And what’s the role of environmental studies in developing such criteria? 

I was nineteen years old in 1969 when I first discovered the Whole Earth Catalog. In many respects, I’ve spent an entire career developing environmental programs that reflected the vision and content of that wonderful book. And I still believe in many of the ideas and possibilities in its’ pages. But what’s in store for today’s nineteen year old, and how will she or he best prepare for the Anthropocene?  What is appropriate environmental learning in 2015? Surely today’s college student requires the “classic” skills of analysis, interpretation, synthesis, and reflective awareness. But what subjects must be studied? And what professions will these students enter? In what ways must the field of environmental studies be revitalized and ttransformed? What educational institutions, research centers, museums, and learning environments will take the necessary bold steps to initiate that transformation? In my next two columns, I’ll address these questions in more detail.

 

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The Ecological Imagination: A Conversation on Art + Environment with Mitchell Thomashow and Ben Champion

“Terrain.org features a conversation between Mitchell Thomashow, former Unity College president and author of The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus, and Ben Champion, the University of Arizona’s director of sustainability. The conversation took place after a visit this spring that Mitch had with the Art & Environment Network at the UA’s Institute of the Environment. The conversation was curated by UA student and Terrain.org blogger Paulina Jenney.” You can read the conversation here.

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The 2014 Climate Leadership Summit: What Happened and What’s Next

This article is currently appearing in Sustainability: A Journal of Record (December, 2014)

The recent White House announcement of a broad reaching United States-China climate policy was surely the single most significant international agreement since the Kyoto Protocol. The two carbon emission leviathans have publicly declared their responsibility and initiated a long and difficult solutions-oriented policy process. Bill McKibben rightfully proclaimed that this announcement may be attributed at least in part to the vocal, persistent, and grass-roots climate action movement. Yet McKibben also emphasized continued vigilance. For sure, the devil is in the details.

If you haven’t yet reviewed the executive summary of this agreement, please do so. It’s impressive.

In short the United States and China have agreed to (1) expand joint clean energy research and development, (2) advance major carbon capture use and storage demonstrations, (3) enhance cooperation on hydrofluorocarbons, (4) launch a climate-smart/low-carbon cities initiative, (5) promote trade in green goods, and (6) demonstrate clean energy on the ground.

What does all of this really mean? None of us can predict how such an agreement will make its way through the halls of Congress, and there will be all kinds of political obstacles along the way. Still, it’s incredibly encouraging, even inspiring, that the leadership of two great powers is finally taking this issue seriously. Perhaps there is a place where global environmental policy commitments and grassroots action may converge. Bill McKibben is right. Such a convergence requires an even greater effort on the part of sustainability practitioners.

In late September (preceding the US-China agreement by about a month), the ACUPCC Climate Action Summit convened in Boston. Of the three hundred plus participants, over fifty were college and university presidents, representing the broadest possible spectrum of American higher education, including minority serving institutions, large state university and college systems, community colleges, large private universities, and small private colleges. I describe the planning process, the sessions, and the goals for the summit in a previous commentary (Journal of Sustainability, August 2014). The conference revolved around five tracks—New Science and Solutions for a Changing Climate, Higher Education’s Climate Leadership Imperative, Creating a Campus Culture of Sustainability, Investment Strategies and Institutional Values, and Corporate Partnerships and Climate Leadership. The full program description is available here.

If there is a single “takeaway” message from the summit, it’s a consensus view that it’s time for all of us to step up. As Wim Wiewel, the president of Portland State university said, “I appreciated the great sense of energy and optimism. There are many people involved in this work that care a great deal about it. There are many opportunities to do things.” Many attendees    expressed similar sentiments. Yet this sense of optimism was buoyed by a pervading restlessness, an acknowledgment that the shifting tides of public policy, the deepening public awareness and concern about climate issues, the seriousness of climate disruption, and the potential for convergent and concerted action all demand new partnerships and possibilities. Indeed, the higher education landscape has changed dramatically in the eight years since the founding of the ACUPCC, and our educational approach must shift accordingly. The United States-China agreement adds to our urgency. And higher education is ready to step up accordingly. 

In this report I’ll review the most prevailing summit themes, as reflected in both the program and the ubiquitous interstitial moments, the buzz in the hallways and restaurants, as well as the post-summit evaluations and responses. I’ll group these themes into six broad, interconnected categories—organizational convergence and specificity, the proliferation of data reporting, resilience planning, civic participation, dynamic partnerships, and social justice approaches.

In the last decade, we’ve seen the emergence of dozens of sustainability and climate related organizations, many of them designed to serve higher education. The ACUPCC summit included presenters and participants from some of the most prominent organizations. Second Nature convened the summit, but worked closely with the leadership of AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education), the USGBC (the United States Green Building Council), NCSE (the National Council for Science and the Environment), and EcoAmerica. There is common agreement among these organizations that there are overlaps and gaps in our coverage. In some areas, we have similar initiatives or purviews (curriculum), while there are important initiatives that demand more attention (leadership support and training). How can we work more effectively together to reduce redundancy, develop common initiatives, strengthen our capacity, and broaden our impact and reach? All of these organizations have reached a level of maturity and development enabling them to conceive the possibilities in ways that weren’t quite clear previously. By determining spaces of convergence, these organizations can work together to develop specificity of mission and practice. I expect we’ll see more convenings and conversations in the weeks and months to follow.

For example, any higher education sustainability practitioner will be quick to share the burden of multiple data reporting schemes. If you are a member of the ACUPCC, AASHE, and follow LEED-building requirements (USGBC), you have to deal with required climate action plans and reports, STARS reporting, and the rigorous LEED points process. These are all important peer-reviewed certification schemes. Higher education institutions have all kinds of accountability and accreditation reports. Add sustainability reporting to the mix, and you have a substantial, even ominous regulatory burden. With the prospects of resilience planning added to the mix, the data reporting requirements will get even more complex. Is it possible to develop a unified, streamlined, yet comprehensive data reporting scheme that serves all the players, contributes to common knowledge and practice, and promotes rigorous objectives? This has gotten the attention of both on-the-ground sustainability managers, their supervisors, and of course the university presidents. Promoting a new approach to data reporting and interpretation is an overriding concern. Expect more conversations on this important challenge.

There is great interest in promoting vibrant and dynamic partnerships. For example, Presidents Steve Knapp (George Washington University) and Neil Kerwin (American University), and their sustainability managers, Meghan Chapple and Chris O’Brien, offered a plenary presentation on the Capital Partners Solar Project. As described at the GW website, “It will provide solar power to the George Washington University (GW), American University (AU) and the George Washington University Hospital (GWUH). It is comprised of 52 megawatts (MW) of solar photovoltaic (PV) power, and it is the largest PV project east of the Mississippi River.” This represents a “scaling up” of renewable energy initiatives that can only be accomplished through partnerships.

There were many other examples of proposed partnerships.

In the corporate realm, representatives from the Xerox Corporation and Altenex met with college presidents to discuss common approaches to research, specifically oriented towards resilience planning, communication and health care needs, financial investment, and how research partnerships and “think tanks” can build new programs and possible collaborations. In the civic realm, Brian Swett the Chief of Environment and Energy from the Boston Mayor’s Office described the various ways that the city is working with regional colleges and universities, suggesting that partnerships of mayor and university presidents presents unparalleled opportunities. There were several workshops emphasizing how statewide university systems can work more closely together. Such institutional partnerships are critical in a time of scarce resources and urgent demands. For example, the California University and State College systems have carbon reduction and sustainability mandates that require collaboration and the sharing of social and intellectual capital. In the track on investment, chief financial officers, board members, presidents, and other staff members met to discuss how investment partnerships can both promote institutional sustainability goals while promoting good financial stewardship.

In all four domains, corporate, civic, institutional, and investment partnerships (many of which are connected) emphasize new forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing. There’s a common understanding that in order to “scale up” we must work together.

This is especially true when it comes to resilience planning. There is growing interest and concern about preparedness in the face of extraordinary weather events. How can a campus plan for such possibilities—from storm surges to heat waves to droughts to unprecedented microbursts? What are the potential health impacts of such possibilities? What’s the role and responsibility of the campus? Doesn’t higher education have a role in educating the public about this challenge? Resilience planning initiatives are complex, multi-sector issues that require the cooperation of government, the private sector, and higher education. At the summit, there was a common understanding that these challenges are crucial to the future of colleges and universities, will inform infrastructure planning, and demand an educational and curricular response as well. These will be ongoing initiatives reflecting some of the new directions for climate action planning and sustainability.

The key to resilience planning is robust civic partnerships. Benjamin Barber, in his book If Mayors Ruled the World (Yale University Press, 2014) suggests that cities are the only civic principalities that can actually get things done, mainly because the politics of cities requires actions and solutions, and cities are less likely to become embroiled in ideological partisanship. If this is true of cities, than surely it is also true for colleges and universities. Indeed, most university presidents are intimately involved in their local and regional communities, understanding their role in the local economy, promoting collaborative initiatives in research and education that are of common interest. Most climate action planning and sustainability initiatives serve much more than the campus as they often impact an entire region. Many summit participants discussed ways that they could further such partnership by virtue of their organizational affiliations. In the case of presidents, it could involve presidential associations and gatherings. For other attendees it might be professional organizations, community associations, and other social networks. The summit involved considerable discussion as to how leadership can mobilize social capital in service of community efforts. 

There is a growing recognition among the attendees that climate leadership will only succeed if it involves multicultural communities, recognizing the powerful social justice challenges linked to human flourishing and sustainability. Higher education faces enormous challenges of access and affordability, all connected to workforce preparation and jobs. Minority serving institutions and community colleges are on the front lines of this challenge, trying to provide educational opportunities in difficult budgetary times. How do these institutions (and others) integrate sustainability concerns as intrinsic to these challenges?

The United States-China agreement sets important targets for climate mitigation and solutions-oriented approaches. However, it will be up to the private sector, colleges and universities, and state and local governments to do the heavy lifting. In the last ten years, higher education has played a prominent leadership role. At the ACUPCC Summit, there was a common recognition that we’ve entered a new phase of our work—scaling up and working together. This will demand new forms of collaboration, revitalized institutional relationships, and the maximization of social capital. These are the prerequisites for climate leadership in the weeks and months ahead. Climate action is both a practical response to an urgent problem and a powerful social movement. Colleges and universities are an incubator for their convergence, especially when they are the platform for emerging partnerships and collaborations. As we work together, this can be a very hopeful time.

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The ACUPCC Climate Leadership Summit: What it Matters

This originally appeared in Sustainability: A Journal of Record (August, 2014)

The sustainability movement has made great strides in the last ten years, especially in higher education. Yet there is a prevailing sense among many of its proponents (myself included) that we’ve only just scratched the surface of what’s necessary and possible. Where do we go next? How do we ramp up our efforts? How do we further enhance the sustainability efforts of higher education?

This conversation is front and center for many of the college and university presidents who are actively engaged with the ACUPCC (American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment). During multiple discussions over the last two years we’ve been thinking carefully about how we can maximize our leadership and leverage, how we can work together, how we can support campus teams and community partners, and how we can support the efforts of our peers and colleagues. Many presidents share a common assumption: we’ve made great progress in launching campus-wide sustainability initiatives, yet there are still many obstacles and challenges. For many campus leaders, sustainability is just one of multiple urgent challenges, including issues of access, affordability and accountability, linked to the increasingly competitive financial outlook.

As a way to confront these challenges, and to provide support for presidents and their sustainability teams who wish to do so, the ACUPCC is organizing the 2014 Climate Leadership Summit, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from September 30-October 3rd. What’s unique about this summit is that it has been organized, planned, and designed by a group of over thirty college and university presidents, reflecting their common concerns and interests.

The summit will serve multiple stakeholders, informed by a core message and organized around five major themes. The core message is that higher education has a special and unique opportunity and role in meeting the challenges of climate change, offering sustainable solutions, and developing educational approaches that prepare a new generation of students, faculty, and staff.

The five major sessions will be chaired by a president from the Steering Committee of the ACUPCC who will organize and develop the specific issues inherent in the themes. These tracks will be coordinated with a series of plenary talks, panel discussions, and parallel sessions for discussing specific issues.

In the remainder of this article, I will briefly describe the planning process leading to the summit, followed by a more detailed description of the five major themes. My purpose in doing so is to provide a deeper understanding of what concerns, inspires, and motivates campus leadership. In a future post-summit article I’ll report on the actual summit proceedings.

Bur first I’d like to add a personal note. In my early days as President at Unity College (2006), I would attend all of the typical college president association meetings. They were all helpful but none of them covered what was my abiding concern—how to use sustainability as the basis for a campus transformation. When Dr. Anthony Cortese told me about the ACUPCC (that was in the early days), I was thrilled, not just because I wanted Unity College to be a charter signatory, but I desperately needed a peer group of college and university presidents that shared my interests and concerns. Having that peer group throughout my presidency (2006-2011) was absolutely invaluable and I know that it was similarly helpful for most of the presidents who became active with the organization. When I stepped down from the Unity College position, I immediately joined Second Nature and worked with Tony and then David Hales (and other presidents) to build the strength of the ACUPCC and to insure the vitality, relevance, and leadership of that peer group.

In my role as Director of the Second Nature Presidential Fellows Program, I work closely with the Steering Committee of the ACUPCC. Over the last two years I have conducted numerous short interviews with the Steering Committee presidents. What are their concerns and challenges? What have they accomplished on their campus? What are they most proud of? Where can they most use the support of the ACUPCC? What is the next important phase of their sustainability work? What is their approach to climate leadership and how do they move that forward on their campus and in the community? What purpose does an ACUPCC Summit serve and what would make it worth their while to attend one?

We’ve been working on that last question for almost two years. The ACUPCC has a Summit Committee consisting of presidents from a variety of institutions (Portland State University, Ball State University, Gateway Technical College, Portland Community College, Lane Community College, Hampshire College, and Bethany College). The committee solicits input from their peers and I channel the results of my interviews into the mix.

The 2014 Climate Leadership Summit program emerges from the very best thinking of this expanded peer group of college and university presidents. That doesn’t mean that the program is absolutely comprehensive of every issue, or that it reflects the challenges and concerns of all 700 or so ACUPCC signatories, or the many institutions that have made great sustainability progress and haven’t signed the ACUPCC. However, it does provide an interesting bellwether for assessing the presumed priorities of campus leadership. In that regard, it’s a fascinating work in progress. Let’s take a closer look at the five major themes.

Most of the presidents understand that the science of climate change is dynamic and unfolding and they are interested in gaining a synthesis of the most important research. Theme One is New Science and Solutions for a Changing Climate. The main objective of this session is to provide a comprehensive update regarding the implications of new science, new inclusive sustained climate assessment processes from the National Climate assessment, and to look at mitigation, adaptation, and resilience as areas of knowledge development and action. Climate change science is complicated, emergent, and it requires sophisticated interdisciplinary knowledge and information exchange. What are the latest findings, how do we bridge the science-practitioner divide in generating and using scientific knowledge, how can climate resilience help integrate knowledge and what do our campuses need to know? How can presidents be the conveners of this dynamic field? Topics will also include the relationship between mitigation and resilience, the impact on and partnership of campuses and communities, the prospects for civic and regional cooperation, and the science of climate change communication.

How then do we take that knowledge and use it effectively? How does it help us better understand the role of presidential leadership in regional and national settings? Theme Two is Higher Education’s Climate Leadership Imperative. College and university presidents can significantly influence public awareness of climate preparedness, sustainability, and the educational, economic, and political issues that emerge. These sessions will focus on how to maximize that influence and leverage in the national landscape.

Topics also include the role of the university in supporting climate science, conducting interdisciplinary research, the role of the public intellectual, building community and regional partnerships, and convening platforms for deliberating policy solutions, ethical dilemmas, and institutional obligations.

Presidents confront a parallel challenge—how to simultaneously promote a national agenda for higher education while mobilizing sustainability initiatives on their home campus. There are different stakeholders in each case. Theme three is Creating a Campus Culture of Sustainability. Promoting sustainability initiatives has the potential to transform the college and university campus—from curriculum to infrastructure—and can positively enhance many aspects of campus life. But what are the best ways to bring the campus together? How can presidents and their teams most effectively mobilize their stakeholders, especially given the complicated challenges facing higher education?

Topics include discussions of curricular and co-curricular challenges, building a campus sustainability team, educating students, workforce preparation, working in a state wide educational system, rating systems and assessment, working with boards and other constituencies, and the organizational challenges of climate action planning.

In the last few years, one of the hottest campus issues, especially for sustainability proponents is aligning campus mission and values with financial decisions. Theme Four addresses these questions—Investment Strategies and Institutional Values: How, Why, and at What Risk? Many campuses are supporting campus-wide discussions on the relationship between campus investments (including endowments, procurement, and capital projects) and institutional values. To what extent do these investments promote sustainability, climate action planning, and other institutional values? These are complicated discussions that involve multiple stakeholders, community members, students and faculty, and the ramifications of these discussions are gaining national coverage. What role does the president, the chief business officer and the board chair play in organizing these discussions and then coordinating campus-wide approaches?

Topics include how to shift investment strategies to align with financial, environmental, and social goals, how to initiate campus-wide dialogues, the educational opportunities of these discussions, and the philanthropic implications of these decisions.

Simultaneous with the expansion of sustainability initiatives on campus is the growing leadership and awareness of the business community. The fields are ripe with opportunities for higher education partnerships, thus informing Theme Five, Corporate Partnerships for Climate Leadership.

Many corporations are making excellent strides in sustainability infrastructure, research, and operations. What are the ways that they can create supportive partnerships with colleges and universities to promote climate leadership? This session will emphasize how specific corporations are addressing climate leadership. How has such an approach changed business operations, strategic planning, and corporate philosophy? What are the ramifications for partnerships with colleges and universities? What does climate leadership mean in a business environment?

Topics covered may include supply chain management, climate resilience, civic engagement, public awareness, reporting and accountability, and multi-sector relationships.

The summit will cover many other issues as well. There will be a series of “presidents only” conversations to build peer support on issues of common concerns. Some of these expand on the topics covered in inclusive sessions listed above. Here’s a list of some of the proposed presidential conversations—Getting Started at a New Institution, Presidential Engagement in Curriculum, Leadership if Faith-Based Institutions, Sustainability in Conservative Communities, Working in State-Wide University Systems, Insuring Continuity Between Presidencies, Fulfilling the Climate Commitment, Working with the Board of Trustees, and Promoting Student Engagement.

There is a special pre-workshop session for Minority Serving Institutions, including a half-day workshop focused on implementing the ACUPCC on Minority Serving Institution campuses. The workshop will cover how to build a successful sustainability team, how to design a sustainability planning process, how to integrate sustainability outcomes into the campus mission, and using sustainability metrics as decision-making tools.

We are also organizing a Sustainability Showcase, a public portfolio of interesting and notable sustainability initiatives and ideas, including efforts from colleges and universities, corporations, publishers, and other organizations. The showcase includes poster and table displays, publications and other literature, exhibits, and installations. It will bring together diverse and innovative exhibits that engage the conference participants, and present an exciting picture of emerging knowledge and of leading change. 

Finally, a great host committee including fifteen local colleges and universities will be offering a series of tours, workshops, exhibits, videos and simulation games. This will significantly enhance the hands-on atmosphere of the summit.

If all of this interests you and your campus is an ACUPCC signatory, I encourage you to participate and to invite campus leadership to do so. If your campus isn’t an ACUPCC signatory, this might be a great time to promote the possibility. If you are unable to attend the conference, I hope this commentary provides you with a good idea of what we’ll cover and how it corresponds to the issues that you’re addressing wherever you work.

The most important outcome for all of us is to continue to build the social capital of robust and resilient peer groups. That is the best opportunity we have to transform higher education on behalf of climate leadership and sustainable solutions.

 

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The Sustainability Movement is Thriving

This essay originally appeared in Sustainability: A Journal of Record (June, 2014)

The sustainability movement is thriving on college and university campuses. There are scores of people from all corners of campus life who deeply care about human flourishing, ecosystem health, and community empowerment. These folks come from blue and red states alike, with diverse political perspectives. They represent every conceivable academic subject—from art to aviation. They work in a variety of job settings—from the cafeteria to the president’s office. More than anything, they want to know that their efforts are contributing to a greater good. Sustainability initiatives bring meaning to people that work, live, study, and play in campus environments.

How do I know this? Over the last several years, since I stepped down from the Unity College presidency, I have been working independently, visiting campuses, giving talks, meeting with groups ranging from students to facilities staff to the senior leadership. I have visited nearly forty campuses in three years. As the Director of the Second Nature Presidential Fellows Program, I work closely with the college and university presidents on the ACUPCC (American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment) Steering Committee. I am on the phone with many presidents discussing their sustainability visions and actions, getting a sense of their accomplishments and aspirations. I also consult with the Sustainable Endowments Institute, facilitating their conferences and brokering meetings for people who wish to learn more about green revolving funds.

I get around. I’ve had contact with people from at least two hundred campuses. Granted, that’s still less than 10% of all the campuses in the United States, and it’s something of a self-selected group. But by any measure it’s a pretty good sample. If you add three years of scanning Sustainability: The Journal of Record, attending several AASHE conferences, and doing the research for a new book (The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus) I feel confident that I have good sense of what people are doing and thinking about. And I am inspired by what I see. What could be better than meeting so many people who wish to contribute to community well being?

I’d like to summarize the highlights of my experience and travels by describing the most salient trends. Here they are in a nutshell. The sustainability movement is intergenerational, bipartisan, co-curricular, hands-on, community oriented, service-based, interdisciplinary, urban, experimental, aspirational, and hopeful. Of course these fine qualities do not always overcome some daunting challenges. Many sustainability practitioners, despite their accomplishments, don’t think their campuses are moving quickly enough, or that too few sustainability oriented courses are embedded in the curriculum, or that the campus hasn’t sufficiently internalized sustainability in its mission and/or planning, or that they are understaffed and lacking resources. So let’s take a brief look at the movement’s characteristics and accomplishments, and then the challenges, culminating with some suggestions for maximizing leverage and effectiveness.

When I give a talk, I typically describe my own background and roots. I love to tell a story about the time (way back in 1969) when I first saw the Whole Earth Catalog appear on the shelves of the 8th Street Bookstore in New York City. Then I look at the audience. The baby boomers are grinning from ear to ear. They know what I’m talking about. I explain to the younger folks in the audience that I was a college student when I discovered the book and that my whole career, in retrospect reflects my aspiration to implement the curriculum in the Whole Earth Catalog. The sustainability movement has deep roots (going back way before 1969). The best learning happens when people of different ages groups share their stories and knowledge. In my experience, interest in sustainability is always intergenerational.

Some of my talks are at campuses in conservative regions of the country. Last September I addressed over a thousand people at Central Community College in Grand Island, Nebraska. I carefully explained how sustainability encourages both economic and ecological debt reduction, frugality, minimizing waste, maximizing efficiency, community service, and improving the quality of campus life. Afterwards, many folks came up to me explaining how they consider themselves political conservatives, but they were very excited by what I had to say. I am convinced that sustainability inspires the possibility of building bipartisan coalitions to support sound campus community decisions.

Sustainability initiatives are typically co-curricular. Campus sustainability knowledge is a community effort, involving many different teachers. Of course the faculty have much to contribute and there are great sustainability oriented courses, programs, and degrees. But sometimes the most enduring learning comes from the hands-on experience of daily life practices, whether it’s working with the campus horticultural staff, or working with the facilities people on energy related issues. We could make a very long list of how campus sustainability initiatives emerge from every conceivable aspect of campus living, and how the habits one learns on a campus can stay with you for a lifetime.

Co-curricular efforts generate community-based service learning. If there’s a campus local food program, it will typically involve farmer’s markets, partnerships with local food pantries, and discussions about the virtues of clean eating. I attended a magnificent community breakfast, sponsored by the University of Kentucky sustainable agriculture program, with food served by the faculty, and guest presentations by local farmers. At Unity College, we established community wind assessment programs, led by students and faculty who helped communities determine whether wind energy was feasible in their locations. Every campus I visit considers how its sustainability initiatives can engage students, staff, and faculty in the local community. These efforts improve town-gown relationships, build regional economic partnerships, and become the basis for long-term sustainable investments.

If you attend a faculty workshop on sustainability, you will find faculty from every conceivable academic background. Sustainability institutes develop uniquely interesting academic collaborations. I recently visited Clarkson University’s Institute for a Sustainable Environment. They build programs that involve engineering, business, economics, energy, and environmental biology, with additional contributions from the liberal arts. If you peruse the catalogs of any of the new sustainability institutes or centers, you will find similarly unique configurations. These institutes are having no difficulty finding exceptional students and faculty.

It is very encouraging to observe the rapid growth of urban-based sustainability programs. This is where environmental concerns interface with social justice, economic equity, community organizing, multicultural learning, diversity studies, new media innovations, architectural design, social network studies, climate adaptation and resilience, and dozens of other dynamic approaches to how we think about the future of cities. Portland State University, Arizona State University, and George Washington, are just a few of the many institutions that are developing new programs to meet the sustainability agenda of cities.

In her excellent commentary in the April 2014 issue of Sustainability: The Journal of Record, Deborah S. Peterson, describes the necessity of sustaining the human spirit. In my experience, the great excitement of sustainability programs is that they embody the best of the human spirit. They are inherently experimental, exploring new solutions to difficult challenges, combining technology, innovation, common sense, and appropriate scale. They are aspirational, promoting a positive, problem-solving orientation, emphasizing practical and collaborative solutions for seemingly intractable challenges. They are hopeful, assuming that we can cultivate the very best ideas and intentions, and lead the way by example. I am convinced that the greatest strength of the sustainability movement is the creative spirit of its practitioners.

These characteristics are contributing to remarkable new programmatic and infrastructure initiatives on hundreds of campuses. When I visit a campus, I try to remind people just how much they’ve accomplished in a very short period of time. Yet there is a pervading urgency that contributes to an underlying restlessness, the sense that so much more needs to get done, and that we are in a race against time. What is the merit of our accomplishments when juxtaposed with the latest IPCC report, or any of the biosphere scale issues that are the motivation for our efforts?

I have had numerous discussions with sustainability directors who worry about their impact. Typically there is an overriding concern. Many people feel that they have job portfolios that are way beyond the scope of what any one person, or small team, or sustainability committee can possibly accomplish. When they consider the work that needs to get done, the attitudes that must change, the challenges of moving higher education bureaucracies, the snail’s pace of curricular change, and the budgetary constraints of many institutions, they can get discouraged. Then there is all the record keeping. Consider all of the excellent, but time consuming reporting systems that sustainability personnel must manage—the STARS system, ACUPCC climate action plans, LEED certifications, not to mention various regional or state reporting criteria.

I’ve spoken to sustainability directors who feel that they don’t get sufficient support from the senior leadership, or that the president is barely aware of the institution’s sustainability efforts. Another common complaint is the perception that sustainability is the sole responsibility of a committee, or a director, and that the whole institution doesn’t recognize its importance. I’ve spoken with college and university presidents who are frustrated that they can’t afford the staff or personnel time to implement comprehensive sustainability initiatives. Of course these resource issues are a great challenge and although sustainability initiatives often save money, many institutions lack the capital investment to realize such savings.

It’s important to consider that the “sustainability professional” is still a relatively new position on many campuses, and many of these professionals are trying to figure out how and where they belong, how to continually justify their position, and how to mobilize the campus more effectively. Consider, too, that most of these professionals are generalists who may have a specific substantive area of expertise, but are typically not experienced in assessing organizational dynamics, higher education leadership, social capital development and time management. One’s good will, intuition, and activism can only go so far.

I appreciate that these are generalizations. There are as many sustainability stories as there are campuses. Most campuses are exploring new territory, and the sustainability professional has to weave an encompassing narrative that fits the cultural setting of the institution. More often than not, despite the perceived challenges, when I ask sustainability professionals to make a list of what they’ve accomplished, they realize that they really have made significant progress.

Our challenge (we are all working together) is to mobilize our best thinking so we can catalyze sustainability efforts. I have two suggestions, one to maximize the effective of the sustainability professional, and the other to build better campus working teams.

I’m convinced that today’s sustainability professional is tomorrow’s campus leader. If you explore the profile of these people, most are early to mid-career professionals, many are women, and they are extremely capable people who are anxious for professional development. But they are typically too busy to pursue this. I’d like to see a national program of short, week long gatherings, specifically designed to work with sustainability professionals, covering organizational leadership, social capital, peer support, and executive mentoring. These types of gatherings build resilient professional networks. The Harvard School of Education has such workshops for senior leaders, including presidents. Why not have them for sustainability professionals? We’re beginning to see the first steps towards such efforts. They should be vigorously supported.

We also need more gatherings that involve an entire campus team, including the senior leadership and the sustainability professionals. By way of example, this year at the ACUPCC summit, we are inviting presidents to bring sustainability teams with them. The idea for doing this came from the presidents who suggested that bringing a team would enable them to coordinate their efforts in a way that isn’t often possible during the daily grind of campus life. Our expectation is that these teams will leave the summit with a better sense of purpose, an opportunity to meet with teams from other institutions, and more confidence in their prospects for success.

We are still in the early days of the sustainability movement. I expect that over the next decade we will see the increasing professionalization of the field, an emerging portfolio of best practices, and a deepening of institutional commitment, buoyed by the ethic of care and creative thinking that inspired sustainability in the first place.

 

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What is the Ecological Imagination?

The Ecological Imagination: A Portfolio of Possibilities

“Art and science: a system of checks and balances…. Science asks: what are the laws and patterns? Art answers: we make them up as we go.”  Alison Deming

The Concept: Why Do We Need The Ecological Imagination?

Learning how to perceive global environmental change is the crucial educational challenge of our times. The twenty-first century planetary crisis orbits around three integrated earth system trends—species extinctions and threats to biodiversity, rapidly changing oceanic and atmospheric circulations, and altered biogeochemical cycles. Despite extraordinary scientific advancements in detecting, monitoring, and interpreting these trends, for many people they remain obscure, remote, and removed from every day life. Why is this so? Shockingly few people observe the natural world, hence they are not cognitively prepared and they lack the experience to make these connections.

In 2001, I wrote Bringing the Biosphere Home (The MIT Press). I suggested that through intimate awareness of local natural history you can broaden your understanding of spatial and temporal variation, developing the capacity to interpret global environmental change. This intimate awareness requires the practice of daily observation, providing the tangible data and experience. Yet making the interpretive leap to connect the local and global, the past and future, the organism and the environment, place and the biosphere requires an ability to move through ecological and evolutionary space and time. This is best achieved by blending rigorous empiricism with leaps of imagination, the mutually supportive narratives of art and science, the ability to identify with and internalize biospheric processes, and to finally understand that human reflective awareness is a manifestation of the biosphere.

This is the foundation of a proposed project—The Ecological Imagination. Perceiving, interpreting and internalizing global environmental change requires a vivid imagination—the ability to move seamlessly through space and time, to expand vision, to think creatively, to improvise and adapt, to directly apprehend what is otherwise overlooked, to cultivate empathy and wisdom, to internalize biological and cultural diversity, and then finally to ask the big important questions about meaning and purpose. 

These big questions must literally be brought back to earth. The ecological imagination promotes educational practices, pedagogical experiments, and workplace applications that enhance biospheric perception. We need street art that provokes thinking about climate and biodiversity, poetry slams that spin tales of the future of life on earth, soundscape designs that help us listen to the biosphere, sustainability initiatives that are beautiful to behold, riveting essays and stories that interpret the meaning of climate change and how it impacts the future, ethical deliberations made real through everyday life decisions, ecologically-based art galleries and exhibitions, or rites of passage that blend conceptual breakthroughs with personal development. Confronting global environmental change challenges us to contemplate death, extinction, and suffering, too. The ecological imagination offers venues for doing so. Let us broaden the boundaries of expression.  

Voices of The Ecological Imagination 

The ecological imagination is embedded in every woman and man. I am convinced that there are scores of people, concerned citizens who care deeply about the future of the planet, who don’t have the appropriate venues for sharing those concerns. The environmental and sustainability professions, for all of their activism, intention, and accomplishment, have reached a temporary plateau.  We need to attract people in professions that may not be ostensibly environmental, but who have skills and approaches that can enhance the ecological imagination and whose contributions are essential. And there are many environmental and sustainability professionals who wish to expand the breadth, scope, and depth of their outreach. Further, there is a new generation of younger professionals with skills in areas such as social networking, computer programming, marketing and retail, data analysis and interpretation, innovative media, blogs and webinars, graphic design, game design, engineering, community planning and activism, the healing professions, public art and performance. We should be working together and sharing our expertise. 

Venues and Ventures

We start with the simplest venue, a gathering of the curious and interested. Perhaps a university, education center, or museum invites students, staff, faculty, and community members to discuss what the ecological imagination means to them, how they would like to pursue it, whether there are specific projects, installations, festivals, or conferences to move the ideas forward. It might start with a simple invitation—please help us unleash the ecological imagination, let us find where it resides, and where it might be manifest. Can we more precisely explain the concept, or develop resilient and evocative metaphors that will summon creativity and inspiration?

Perhaps the gathering and its offshoots leads to a course, or a sequence of courses, taught by small teams of collaborators, drawn from different fields, but emphasizing the integration of the arts and global change science. Those courses might generate new projects in a variety of venues, including webinars, podcasts, websites, as well as visceral encounters such as field trips, studios, workshops, murals, demonstrations and charettes. All of these projects together might lead to certificates, majors, or graduate programs

Interconnected Fields of Inquiry and Practice: A Preliminary Syllabus for The Ecological Imagination

Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape Design

The field of acoustic ecology involves the design, organization, and interpretation of sound, linking human awareness of sound to the vibrational dynamics of the ecosystem. Soundscape design applies acoustic ecology to habitats, landscapes, and buildings. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology is published by the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. R. Murray Shafer’s book, The Tuning of the World, inspired several decades of research and practice.

Ecological Design

Ecological design uses the principles of biophilia, environmental perception, and architecture to design buildings that integrate ecological principles with human habitation. It includes the emerging fields of biomimicry, biodesign, biophilic design, synthetic biology, and conservation psychology. These fields are synthesized in Stephen Kellert’s fine book, Buildings for Life. Hundertwasser, the extraordinary Austrian artist, was an exemplar of the artistic incorporation of these concepts. See especially Andreas Hirsch, ed., Hundertwasser, The Art of the Green Path.

Interaction Pattern Design

Peter Kahn, a psychologist at The University of Washington, is developing the study and practice of interaction pattern design. “Interaction patterns can be compared to words, which have definitions, can be isolated, but rarely exist, by themselves. Some examples of interaction patterns include being under the night sky, sitting by a fire, recognizing and being recognized by a nonhuman other, hunting, foraging, walking the edges of nature, moving away from settlement and the return, and interacting with the periodicity of nature (such as the sunrise and sunset of each day, the seasons of the year, or the cycles of a garden).  It’s not enough just to bring elements of nature into the built environment.  Equally important is to create the affordances for people to interact with nature.” This builds on the work of philosopher David Abram, who writes vividly about the phenomenology of environmental perception in Becoming Animal.

Game Design

The extraordinary popularity of gaming of all kinds, from the computer to the board to the field, has spawned more than just a profitable industry, but academic programs organized around game design as a dynamic and versatile professional orientation. Games promote improvisation and imagination as well as the ability to explore and experiment with complex subject matter. The principles of game design lend themselves to ecological, evolutionary, and earth system concepts, allowing for scenario development, variable scalar dynamics, emergent properties, and interactive relationships. See the kind of ongoing work in places like New York University’s Game Center, as well as their new academic programs in Game Design.

Information Design and Infographics

Infographics is rapidly becoming a profound way to communicate complex information in a visually compelling way. Isabel Meirelles, in her book Design for Information elaborates on six approaches: hierarchical structures (trees), relational structures (networks), temporal structure (timelines and flows), spatial structures (maps), spatio-temporal structures, and textual structures. This is also an ideal conceptual approach for communicating concepts of global environmental change.

Public Art and Performance

A survey of public art, especially graffiti, murals, and sculptures, reveals an extraordinarily rich expressive content, filled with originality and spontaneity. You can easily develop a robust catalog of environmentally and socially related themes. Linda Weintraub, in To Life: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet provides a comprehensive guide to much of this work. Similarly compelling is the grassroots work of countless global artists, whose work demonstrates an indigenous, place-oriented approach to global environmental change. See Nicholas Ganz, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents.

Narratives and Memoirs

Personal stories, illustrated journals, memoirs and biographies, non-fiction writing, poetry and fiction—all of these genres allow people to address their concerns, desires, hopes and dreams regarding their place in the world and the fate of the planet. With the multi-media possibilities now at hand, including on-line journals, graphic novels, field notebooks, and even “apps” there are cross-genre forms of expression of great interest and enormous influence. From Terrain to Ecotone to Yale Environment 360 to Orion, from digital publications to hand-written field notes, there are superb venues for personal and collective expression of the ecological imagination.

Barefoot Global Change Science

I describe my vision for barefoot global change science in Bringing the Biosphere Home:

“Cadres of citizens, schoolchildren, elders—people from all walks of life—meet in schools, libraries, parks, and on the Internet, to share stories and data. They pool their observations and expertise so they can track environmental change in their neighborhood. Via electronic communication, they compare data with folks from other places. Professional environmental scientists work regularly with citizen groups and school children to provide training and guidance. They jointly establish local research projects. Artists draw biospheric murals on the sides of buildings. A special television channel shows global change satellite maps twenty-four hours a day. Every computer is sold with built-in geographic information software.”

 Some of this work is already happening. It requires curation, organization, and intention. For an ecologist’s view on a similar approach, see Rafe Sagarin, Observational Ecology.

Exploratory Cartography

There is no better way to learn about your community than to draw a map of the place where you live, and to do so in the most expansive way possible. Consider a “map” in the broadest possible way—as a visual representation of the patterns of home, community, place and biosphere. Katherine Harmon has superbly curated such maps in her books You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination and The Map as Art.

Projects for The Ecological Imagination

Many possibilities unfold. Let’s consider just a few topics that require our best attention and awareness. These might be courses in their own right, or the learning objectives for an entire program, or perhaps just special events and projects that are hosted where they are most relevant. I’ve listed just a few possibilities. Fill these in and invent new categories.

  • Biodiversity Hotspots and Cultural Diversity (The relationship between ecological and cultural diversity, cosmopolitan culture and urban ecology, the meaning of wilderness in the anthropocene).

  • Migration and Diaspora (the movement of peoples and species, environmental security and world peace, climate refugees, dislocation and anomie, homelessness, indigenous knowledge)

  • The Future of the City (urban ecology and sustainable systems, the urban rural divide, ecological architecture and city planning, participatory democracy, public health and social justice)

  • Biogeochemical Cycles, the Biosphere, and Microbial Ecology (earth system science and global change, interpreting global environmental change, biospheric perception, earth metabolisms, biogeography)

  • Seminal Moments During the History of Life on Earth (the great evolutionary transitions, the geological time scale, the origins of life, adaptation)

  • The Ecology of Improvisation (the biosphere as an improvisational process, how music, play, and art emulate biospheric processes, improvisation and learning, improvisation and leaderships)

  • The Next 100,000 Years (how to think about the distant future, intergenerational ethics, the future of life on earth)

  • This Place in Time (deep time and the present moment, cultural and historical origins of human habitation, family history, the natural history of home)

  • Earthly Cosmologies (earth-based knowledge systems in different cultural and historical settings, I Ching as biospheric knowledge system, the universe story, myth and narrative).

 

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Face Down Hockey

(Unpublished and originally written in 2005)

It’s a cold January morning in the deep freeze of a long, snowless winter. I walk gingerly on an ice-covered bike path in the residential section of a small city. Some winters are defined by ice. A snowstorm morphs into freezing rain. A thick, mild rainstorm is followed by very cold weather. Roads are always slippery. Every step is perilous. You yearn for snow, but there is only ice.

The bike path sits on an old railroad bed, so it is slightly elevated above the surrounding landscape. On one side of the path there’s a row of modest houses. A shallow, but steep depression separates the path from the houses, so the backyards form a bowl. A few days ago, a flooding rain preceded a snappy freeze, the perfect sequence for a frozen topography. These shallow backyard bowls are now mini ice skating rinks.

I observe two young boys, perhaps ten or eleven years old, sprawled on the ice, lying about forty feet apart. They’re wearing hockey jerseys and handling hockey sticks. From their prone position, laying face down on the ice, they’re sliding a hockey puck back and forth, in a laid-back rhythm, as if they are marking time. “Let’s call this face down hockey,” one boy yells. “No, let’s call it lazy man’s hockey,” the other responds.

Several months later, during the lime green days of New Hampshire Spring, the ice is gone, an ephemera, replaced by a tidy, green lawn. There are roughly a dozen balls scattered around the premises—tennis balls, wiffle balls, soccer balls, all species of balls—marking the arrival of a new season, and hence, new sports, too. In the corner, I notice a netted backstop, and the boys, now joined by several friends, are playing some backyard baseball variant. Nearly every afternoon the boys are outside playing ball, forming their own narrative of players and teams, emulating major leaguers, engaged in the tangible delight of their home grown game elevated to the fantasy of a world-class championship scale.

On returning from a late May vacation, I notice that during my absence a trampoline appears. Throughout the summer, the trampoline is teeming with neighborhood kids, both boys and girls, animating the landscape with their incessant jumping. The baseball continues, enlivened with the springing motion of youngsters bobbing up and down.

With Autumn and the changing foliage of maples, oaks, and birch, the glorious colors are framed by a mottled, leafy lawn, with goal posts on either end, deftly placed around two soccer nets. On alternate days, the boys practice kicking field goals or playing one on one matches of soccer. Sometimes there are groups of a dozen boys (and a few girls) playing touch football.

My prevailing memory of this four-season collage is observing two boys practicing many different sports, spending their childhood outdoors, through all kinds of weather regimes, enduring and enjoying the elements as the dynamic backdrop for their cavalcade of sports. There is much to reflect on here about the purity of play, the virtues of their pursuits, or the celebratory relationship between atmosphere, landscape and play.

Why is it fun to lay face down on ice, during a cold dark evening, shoveling a hockey puck back and forth?  Although there is a relaxing rhythm in the regularity of a relaxed toss, it does tend to get boring after awhile. Far more compelling is the sensory delight of feeling the ice. The play challenge is unremarkable without the novelty of the ice.

A few nights after observing “face down hockey” I decide to try the same activity, without the hockey sticks—face down ice sprawling. Why is it so much fun to do this? The sheer visceral sensation of lying on frozen water is amazingly pleasurable. Ice is simultaneously wet and dry, sticky and smooth, bumpy and flat, hard and soft, fragile and strong, slippery and supple. In just a few moments you notice all of this and marvel at the remarkable variety of contrasting qualities. As a field of play—frozen water—it is infinitely interesting because of its visceral complexity. Pushing a puck back and forth is only fun on ice because the puck is designed to respond to these qualities. The puck is an elegant and graceful human-designed play response to the mystery of ice.

Ice as frozen water is a biospheric medium of great power and mystery. Water’s ubiquity displays an elusive mobility. Typically, we observe liquid water in various movement forms. Ice reduces the pace of water’s movement to a grinding halt, almost as if it is also freezing time, or at least reducing the flow of events to very slow motion. Ice provides a visible record, a history, of water’s most recent movement. Every crack and bump indicates a change in temperature. When you lie on the ice on a cold winter night, even if you don’t consciously observe these things, you just know they are true. Such direct knowledge comes with the experience. Ice is a phase of water in a place you are visiting and you know what it’s like to experience that place frozen.

Ice’s mystery is enhanced by what it hides and reveals. Ice displays gradients of opacity, translucency and transparency. Sometimes you can see the depths and levels of frozen water, or plants that lie just below the surface. Other times you can’t see a thing. Ice masks depth. It can be a mirror of glass or a sheath of white.

For the boys, the ice is a matrix of safety. In their backyard, the water is shallow enough that even in the most misleading of circumstances, if they were to break through the ice, they would get wet and cold, but emerge safely and walk a few feet home. However, walking into the middle of a frozen pond no matter how cold it’s been and how solid the ice appears, or how well you think you know the places of running water that no freeze will thwart, there is an element of danger, even if it resides as a modest uncertainty in the depths of your imagination.

Recently, I have taken to skiing the four-mile circumference of a local pond. I know that when snowmobiles and ice fisherman have left their mark, it’s surely safe enough for me. There’s an island in the middle of the pond and I ski to it often. There is a stretch between shoreline and island when you are far from shore. No matter how frozen the pond appears to be and how free you may feel, there are moments of vulnerability. This mystery of ice reflects freedom and vulnerability and the combination of the two, in the right proportion, is one measure of why playing on ice is fun. For some people play is enhanced as the vulnerability factor is increased. They are most free when most vulnerable. For others, the opposite is true.

When I am biking down a hill at twenty-five miles an hour on a balmy summer day, I know that there is some danger. I’ve had a blowout in such a circumstance and took a resounding and painful fall. Yet that doesn’t stop me from riding fast. I continue to ride down that hill, despite, or perhaps in relationship to that danger, because I feel free when I do so.

Ice hockey (which I’ve never played) had its origins on frozen ponds and streams. The idea of skating at great speeds while handling a puck and firing it at a net is both dangerous and beautiful. I imagine it’s the ice that makes the game fun. In the Harry Potter novels, Quidditch is a type of ice hockey in the air, played in a different medium, with a touch of magic. It’s a game that is simultaneously elegant and dangerous.

Perhaps it’s a great leap to compare “face-down hockey” with Quidditch. What I wish to convey is that they are games played on fields of nature and it is the fields that provide the mystery, the challenge, and the fun. Whether you are lying face down on the ice, or skiing at a modest pace around a shallow pond, or cruising your bike down a long flowing hill, or flying through the air on a broomstick, you are engaged with a biospheric medium. It’s the mystery of that medium, scaled to the activity of your game, which is the source of your play. I suggest that the heart of the sport, so deeply rooted in our Pleistocene origins, is the sheer joy of experimenting with our bodies and minds, while feeling free in the fields of biospheric play.

From childhood through adolescence and even into my adult years, my most vivid, enthralling and engaging landscapes of play revolved around making, erasing and reformulating boundaries in a seemingly unbounded setting. Wild settings were the ultimate challenge. Play became a confluence of landscape and imagination. Improvisational flexibility was intrinsic to both rule making and play narrative. Improvisational play was erecting boundaries (and rules) in a wild landscape.

I grew up on the south shore of Long Island, only fifteen minutes from Rockaway and Atlantic Beach. I spent hours inventing games on a sandy beach at the boundary between ocean and land. I admired the daunting spectacle of power and change, the inexorable shifting of surf, tide, and sand. Until early adolescence (I was the same age as the eleven year old face-down hockey players) my favorite activity, transcending even baseball, was to experiment with the magnificent variations of the shoreline. I remember an inlet, only about ten feet wide, and how much fun it was to build dams, only to see them succumb to the force of an incoming tide. I enjoyed low tide because you could always dig just a short distance and create a pool of water. My friends and I created underground networks of pools and tunnels, but it would only last until the tide came in. Our structures finally crumbled, slowly at first, and then catastrophically. Watching the structures disappear was as much fun as creating them.

Creating, modifying, directing, and channeling watercourses were fine early lessons in understanding the flow of landscapes. It was a great day in my suburban neighborhood when someone chose to wash his care. The stream of water coming off the car flowed downhill and we followed the runnels and channels to see where and how far they went, how long they lasted, and how we might direct them. Each runnel seemed to have its own personality so we named them as befitting the character of their idiosyncratic course.

As an eleven year old, I built enormous “ball castles” on the beach. I would dig a large hill, packed with mud and sand, making it stable enough to carve tunnels and paths. The challenge was to create a series of roads and runways so a tennis ball placed at the top of the castle slowly rolled down, disappearing for awhile, and then mysteriously emerging from a network of invisible paths. These were very hard to build as the tunnels would constantly cave in. But we had an unlimited supply of sand and water and all the time in the world.

We would invent baseball games, too. There were games that involved playing at the boundary of the incoming or outgoing tides, in which your challenge was to catch the ball before it hit the water. How spectacular it was to make a diving catch as you were falling into the ocean. We devised miniature baseball diamonds, with the ocean boundaries serving as the outfield wall.

Tennis balls were soon surpassed by the Frisbee which had the unique quality of riding microthermal air currents. Once you learned how to toss it (easier than learning to ride a bike), but not quite so simple as throwing a ball, you could experiment with it in many interesting ways—throwing it so it would return to you, tossing it so it would bounce and hop, flipping it so it would make successive upward hops, and flinging it so it would start out traveling in one direction and finish in another. The Frisbee is a wonderful biospheric toy because it is designed to ride the wind. Your mastery of the Frisbee depended on more than your skill as a thrower and catcher, but also on your ability to read the weather, not just the wind speed and direction, but also the humidity. Every unique weather situation and landscape subtly influences the flight of the Frisbee.

There were probably hundreds of Frisbee related games, with regional variations, eventually condensed into more formal rules systems such as “Ultimate Frisbee.” On the beach we played Frisbee football, Frisbee running bases, and various track and field type events involving distance, speed, and accuracy.

Years later, when I moved to a small house deep in the New Hampshire woods, my then pre-adolescent son and I devised a Frisbee golf game. We played it every Sunday morning before watching New York Giants football. We each had a Frisbee and alternately found landmarks between fifty and one hundred yards distant—tall trees, mailboxes, boulders, protruding branches. You’d try to reach and hit the target in as few throws as possible. Each week we’d find different courses and challenges, all emanating from our house. However, the final “hole” was always the basketball hoop on the garage. You’d have to make a basket with the Frisbee.

Forested landscapes and all varieties of settled and/or wilderness settings provide terrific backdrops for tossing a Frisbee or tennis ball. Throw either object through the rows of a parking lot or the tall trees in a forest, in each case, figuring out the space available, the obstacles to be overcome and/or incorporated, the openings for flow and movement, and the slight possibility of danger and loss. Watch the Frisbee sail beyond your grasp into the valley below. Watch the ball roll under a car or into a busy street. Feel the remorse as either Frisbee or ball gets stuck in a thick tree, or lost in an inpenetrable thicket. And who hasn’t inadvertently broken a window?

Several years ago I was with some new colleagues, traveling from Los Angeles to the High Sierras to teach a Sense of Place workshop. We stopped in a desert town in Southern California, piled out of the van, and after relieving ourselves and refueling accordingly, we tossed a tennis ball around a funky parking lot at the edge of the desert, undaunted by the heat and sagebrush. We did this with great glee, becoming friends while doing so.

To this day, and perhaps later today when I take my walk, I derive great pleasure from bouncing a tennis ball, and then on the homeward, mostly downhill journey, dropping the ball down the hill seeing how long it will follow the path, staying within the boundary, using gravity until it comes to rest, waiting for me to pick it up and once again initiate its passage.

From my earliest childhood days, I have always loved throwing, catching and navigating balls. Playing ball has always been intrinsic to my life experience, as genetic as the color of my hair. An object relations psychologist will insist that the matrix of warmth and play represented by rolling a ball to my mother and father, and the support and love surrounding the activity was the source of my pleasure. An evolutionary psychologist will argue that my ball-playing predisposition reflects a Pleistocene practice, a way to prepare my eye-hand coordination for hunting and other survival skills. A cultural anthropologist may suggest that I grew up in a culture surrounded by toys, one of which was balls, and that I learned to play with balls because of their ubiquity and as a way to adopt to the cultural rules of play that I learned in infancy and early childhood. And they will all tell me that there’s no way I can objectively dispute their interpretations based on the impression of memory, and the biased retrospection of my life narrative.

But I will insist anyway that all of these interpretations (each of which may convey some measure of truth), both for me, and for all ballplayers, are incomplete. I love playing ball because it is an amazingly engaging way to come out of myself and into nature, to learn about movement and pattern. Balls are agents of exploration and discovery. As I watch a ball float through the air or down a hill, or perhaps disappear into the brush, or land in a mitt, I realize that the ball’s life story and mine are inextricably entwined. We are the same being, rolling down the hill together, swishing through the hoop, traveling through many hands. Balls, too, are agents of mystery and wonder. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that balls taught me about the infinite varieties of landscapes, weather systems, and environmental change, about the intermingling of air, earth, and water, that they were tools for learning about the biosphere? And more importantly, they were a means to engage and participate in biospheric play. Or still further, they taught me to celebrate life.

When I realized at age four or five that the ball would be the subject of a broader story or game, the focus, for example, of baseball, and eighteen players could play a fascinating game in an enclosed playing field, all interacting together around a common devotion to the ball, I realized there was a deeper narrative of meaning and participation. I vouch no overblown sacred qualities to these games. I declare no metaphorical significance. I only suggest that something about playing with balls, and doing so with others, taught me about my place in the world, and taught me to appreciate the world, and celebrate my place in it.

To this day, reflecting a life long pattern, whenever I see people playing ball, I turn my head to watch them. If I am passing them in a train or car, I hope for traffic so I get to observe them for awhile. If I’m taking a walk, I’ll stop and watch (as long as I am unobtrusive). Whenever I see a game of baseball or basketball, regardless of the age group, even as a fifty-five year old, I long to join them.

Surely there are dozens of reasons why people long to play ball—to compete and test oneself against peers, to find community and identity, to work through aggression, to accomplish something or to gain recognition—you name the reasons. I, too, have played ball for all of these reasons. But transcending these explanations, there is a deeper level of engagement. I play ball to know my place in the landscape, to ground myself in the topographical logistics of my mind and body, to engage with weather, landforms, and watercourses, to enter a state of biospheric awareness and participation that I can’t surpass in any other way.

John Muir, the great environmental archetype of American wilderness writing describes his glee and fascination with rolling rocks and boulders down scree slopes in the High Sierras. Muir would in no way have been inventing baseball games (although he may have known about baseball). Muir didn’t roll those rocks to score points or achieve some navigational goal, he was just interested to see what would happen as the rock made its way down the slope. Who wouldn’t love to do something like this? Muir was undoubtedly intrigued to observe that each toss was different, and that each corresponding path varied as well. But patterns began to emerge, determined by landscape, soil type, slope, and gravity. He could become the rock, vicariously experiencing the same journey, a geomorphological probe. When you sit on a sled and careen down a hillside, sure the speed is a rush and the navigational challenge is fun, but the finest sledding moments are the most carefree when you can just close your eyes and float freely, noting where you might arrive as if you are a pebble bouncing down a scree slope in a high glacial valley. I can’t say for sure that this impulse is at the core of Muir’s playfulness, but he was a keen observer of nature and he surely did love to play.

Muir was also known for his classic tree-climbing adventures in the middle of snowstorms. Perhaps he was the nineteenth century equivalent of today’s “extreme sports” participant. He wanted to place his body in the elements, not only to practice agility and alacrity, but simply to experience his body swaying with a tall tree, in the wind together, merging with the snowstorm by playing with it.

Snowstorms are turbulent weather phenomena, the result of clashing, interpenetrating weather systems that span the tropics and the arctic. In their convergence they sweep moisture from the ocean, pushing it skyward high into the atmosphere, freezing the moisture and turning it into snow which falls to the landscape as it is driven by the wind—a pressure gradient pushing air across vast landscapes. Are snowstorms merely a form of biospheric play?

When a snowstorm strikes, there’s little you can do. Cars grind to a halt. The streets are quiet. Commerce diminishes. Transportation stops. Sometimes there are power outages. The biosphere sweeps over you and you are powerless to stop it. What better way to pay homage to the grandeur of such a process than to go outside and play with it, to walk face first into the wind, and then to turn around and have it push you? Look skyward and count the snowflakes before the daunting infinity of scale and variation completely overwhelms you as you feel a snowflake land on the tip of your nose. Every child knows that there is nothing more fun than snow. It’s delightful to watch because of the beautiful patterns it beholds. It’s fun to play with because you can mold it and shape it as you require. Yes, there are snowballs, too, and all kinds of games you can play with them. You can jump in it or glide in it or use it for recreational transportation. It’s only the most cold-hearted, work-hardened, indifferent person who forgets the great celebration of playing with snow.

Remember the boys who were playing face-down hockey? Well, five years have now passed and I never see the boys outside anymore. Perhaps they’re involved in organized sports now. Or maybe, God forbid, they’ve moved inside to use their Playstations. Perhaps other demands of adolesence have rendered their backyard too small for their expanding cognitive horizons. Or maybe the family has moved. I’m reminded of the beautiful, but sad lyrics by Gene Lees for the famous Bill Evans tune, “Waltz for Debby.”

“One day all too soon she’ll grow up and she’ll leave her dolls and her prince and her silly old bear. When she goes they will say as they whispered good-bye. They will miss her, I fear, but then, so will I.”

Surely their forays into biospheric play will never be as naïve and innocent as they once were. Yet I am confident that any childhood that entails biospheric play nourishes a person for life, and that for these boys, whatever their future beholds, they will always have a foundation for both participating in sports and observing nature.

In their darkest and loneliest moments, they may fondly remember shoving a hockey puck back and forth on a cold, icy night. When they have young families of their own they may provide their children with the space and time to play outdoors. As they ponder various life choices and possibilities, they’ll have face-down hockey as a measure of purity and participation, as an aspiration and a possibility for how to live well. In the ritual of their outdoor games, they will celebrate the landscapes of their lives—with every toss of a ball, fling of a frisbee, or bike-riding descent of a long, steady hill.

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Paco

Paco.JPG

Since 1967 I’ve had three different dogs, all the same breed—the miniature Schnauzer. In keeping with my own preference for beard and hair, and with respect to the adage that dogs and their human partners bear an uncanny resemblance, I’ve let the hair grow on all of these dogs, so they took on a wilder look, shedding the dandy coiffures given to most Schnauzers.

I’m telling you about these guys because of their remarkably distinctive approaches to play. Three different dogs, same breed, same level of love, friendship, and attention. The first dog, Poncho (1968-1986), on waking in the morning, would race to your bedroom, grab a sock from under the bed, or one that you were about to put on, retrieve it, and then take it to another part of the house, play with it under a table, and encourage you to come and get it in a tireless game of keep away. However, Poncho showed virtually no interest in chasing balls, gathering sticks, or running with you. His favorite activity was tug of war, the one game that all three of these dogs had in common. Despite all of my best efforts, and believe me I tried, I could never get Poncho to play ball with me. He just wasn't interested.

Ponchos’s successor, also named Poncho (1988-1997), was reared in the woods of New Hampshire (the first Poncho spent his first seven years in the Long Island suburbs). His favorite activity was to roam the woods on his own for hours at a time. He didn’t particularly like people, immediate family excepted, was rather intimidating to strangers, and for the most part showed no interest in balls, catches, sticks, or joint jogging. Let me explain his favorite game. The kids would go to the top of our spiral stair case. They tied a dog biscuit to a string and would slowly lower the biscuit into Poncho’s jumping range, while swinging it like a pendulum. Poncho would fall for the bait each time. The kids tried to get him to stand on his heels for as long as possible, eventually rewarding him with the biscuit. As far as fun and games goes, that was it. Poncho’s idea of a good time was a very long walk in the woods (either with or without you). Fittingly, but with great distress to our family, he met his end in a tussle with coyotes.

Paco (1998-2013), name change at the behest of the kids who said its time to move on, was intrigued by all kinds of toys and games. He loved stuffed animals and had a little box (lying next to his extensive bone collection) with about a dozen of them. If my wife and I were sitting on the living room floor playing a board game, he’d walk over to his toy box, grab a stuffed animal, bring it over to us in hopes of engaging in a game of toss, keep away, or tug of war. When he was on his own outdoors he would hardly ever leave the vicinity of the house other than to visit a neighbor’s dog, but rather he’d find plastic bottles, old boxes, or anything he could play with, alternately chasing, dragging, shredding or crushing it. He spent hours chasing chipmunks, squirrels, mice, and shrews just as the Ponchos did, but with a transcending intensity and perseverance. On a balmy spring day, he would dig holes for hours on end, trying to snuff out a chipmunk. Every so often he’d catch one, kill it, and then play with it, carrying it around, shaking it, flipping it, exactly the way he did it with stuffed animals. However, he was much more private with his live prey (thank goodness) and didn’t urge us to play tug of war with it as he did with stuffed animals.

Paco was a big-time ball player. He loved nothing more, indeed, he eagerly awaited those precious moments when you hit balls with a bat (he liked wiffle balls in particular) so he could retrieve them. We had a collection of a dozen balls lying around the driveway (our house is nestled in a woodland setting), and I gathered the balls, hit them down the driveway into the woods as Paco pursued them with great purpose and intent. He made some incredible catches. Our son nicknamed him Ray-Ray, in honor of the Mets superb fielding shortstop Ray Ordonez, after Paco made several consecutive over the shoulder, turn around leaping, mid-air catches. Paco would play ball anytime or anyplace. Like me, he was born a ballplayer.

Paco also loved to fetch sticks. At the furthest point of a long walk, just after we’d turned around to return home, he would find a stick, the bigger the better, and drag it part of the way home. He’d do this for a short while and then look for another stick and continue the game, especially if you stayed interested by encouraging him, and this process would prevail all the way home. I’ve always been amazed at what I can only describe as Paco’s creative ability in finding objects to play with in diverse environments. Perhaps most astonishing is that I’ve observed him, on his own, find a stick and use it to knock a plastic bottle around the driveway. This is a dog who excelled at improvisational play. By the way, Paco would not grab socks and hide them, nor would he care much about dog biscuits dangling from the spiral staircase.

What accounts for the intriguingly different play habits of these three dogs? There are all of the obvious interpretations. Maybe vigorously shaking stuffed baby elephants is a way to practice shaking dead chipmunks. Maybe gathering a stick is a way of bringing something back to the home base hearth. Or perhaps play, in this case, is nothing more than a wonderful inter-species communication medium. Perhaps Paco merely wishes to please us and he does so by engaging in play.  

Yet I’m convinced that dogs play simply because they enjoy doing so. It is a tangible way to explore their world, to gain pleasure from doing so, to “live” in the moment, to use their bodies and stimulate their minds. Of course they are dogs and we are humans and we should do our best not to anthropomorphize their behavior. Dogs and humans have a long and complex Pleistocene relationship, and crucial to our deal and intrinsic to why we like each other is that we can play together. Dogs are fun because they are terrific players. They coax us to play, just as they seek to protect us,  and in so doing reward us for providing them with food and shelter. They play with us not only because they enjoy it, but they know that we do too.

It gives me great pleasure to watch dogs play and to play with them. All of my best friendships with people and animals alike are based on mutually enjoyable play behaviors and styles. When I ask why dogs play, I do so to further enter the mystery of mammalian behavior more generally, and ultimately to better know myself and our species. But mostly when I play with dogs I have no such deep thoughts and I’m quite sure they don’t either. But in playing together we come to know life better and we get closer to nature too, both through the challenge of our game, and the interspecies link to our mammalian ancestry. Perhaps human play is an attempt to get to the core of mammalian behavior and we are searching, ultimately, for our Pleistocene origins.

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Marbles

“Basically, in all cultures, marbles games fall generally into three categories: chase games in which two or more players alternately shoot at each other along a makeshift meandering course; enclosure games in which marbles are shot at other marbles contained within a marked-off area; and hole games in which marbles are shot or bowled into a successive series of holes.” Fred Garrett, The Great American Marble Book

 

At the opposite extreme from golf, a game in which you smack a small ball a long distance on a vast landscape, is marbles, a game which uses small glass (originally wooden) balls in the confines of a bounded playground, dirt lot, or small room. In my early childhood (1950s) older boys still played marbles outdoors in playground settings or on sidewalks. But by 1960 public marble games were very, very rare. However, within the confines of my room, between the ages of 7 and 13 (1957-1963), I played marbles indoors for hours.

One great things about marbles is that you could get a lot of them. Even kids could afford them. After several years of collecting marbles or receiving them as gifts, I had several hundred. They were colorful, pleasant, even beautiful to look at (I especially enjoyed translucent marbles that I could hold up to the light), they made a great sound when knocked against each other, and each marble had its own special qualities. At the peak of our marble playing and collecting (my brother and I were mainly in this together), we had an entire community of marbles, each distinctive for its size, color, speed, condition, and overall attractiveness. There were some nondescript marbles. But some marbles had remarkable characteristics, even an identity, and that identity emerged or evolved as the marble was more or less successful in play. As it grew in stature, it revealed an unfolding narrative. 

We had one steel marble, undoubtedly a renegade marble from some other game, appropriately named “Steely” whose speed and slickness presented a streamlined efficiency as captain of your marble team. There was “Whitey,” just a plain ordinary sized solid white glass marble. You saved Whitey for clutch moments as he always seemed to succeed. Grandpappy was an oversized catseye with a white spiral in a clear glass. You didn’t want to overuse him because of his age, but you could always count on him to capture several marbles. We had four other oversized catseyes whose sheer size made them formidable. How could I forget “Peewee,” an undersized marble with super speed and finesse!

We played several kinds of home grown marble games. Some involved only a few marbles with games that emphasized accuracy and capture. There was a game which required you to roll your marble as close to a wall as possible. We loved using marbles along with our building blocks, setting up mazes, ramps, and tunnels, and all sorts of contraptions, similar to the ball castles we liked to build on the beach. There were games that involved shooting marbles around the house, trying to get from one room to another with the fewest rolls, taking into account different floor surfaces and spatial arrangements. Block baseball used marbles and we invented marble football and ice hockey.

The game that we played most often was a shoot and capture game of our own invention. It was best scaled to my brother Peter’s room as there was a good carpet for marbles, it had smallish dimensions, and I seeded the floor by randomly tossing out ten marbles. Each player would choose fifteen marbles to shoot at the others. If you struck one or more you would retrieve them all and they would become part of your stock. If you missed, the marble remained on the field. The game ended when all of the marbles were captured. When you shot “Grandpappy” you took on the persona of an old man who still had strength and power, all saved for one great shot. You would talk like him, truly becoming “one with the marble.” Peter loved Grandpappy and would always choose him in our pre-game draft. I would choose the bulky oversized marbles as I wanted their capturing bulk. My brother went for speed and personality. 

I also had favorite marbles, although I valued them less for their “athletic prowess” and more for their astonishing beauty and mystery. Marbles taught me the concepts transparent, translucent, and opaque. I took great delight from admiring a colorful translucent marble that I could hold up to the light and then bring close to my eye, peering into a world that became incredibly near, that I could hold in my hand, but could never quite enter. Still, I could imagine myself inside the marble, bathed in its mysterious light, knowing I couldn’t fully enter its magnificent translucency. I had one marble that reminded me of pictures I had seen of Jupiter in my treasured book, The Golden Guide to the Stars. I had others that looked like Uranus and Neptune. How could it be, I wondered, that a marble and a planet could look so much alike, could have so much in common, be so close to me, and yet so distant and unknowable? How I adored the correspondence between Neptune and my translucent marble, depicting a world outside myself that I could only enter through imagination and wonder. I had marbles that resembled the ocean surface and some that looked like the desert. Many years later when looking at a translucent green ocean I would remark to my kids that the ocean reminded me of a marble that I had as a child, repeating that idea so often that it became a family joke and cliche. As a young child, it was easy to move from marble to planet to ocean and then back again. These were the marbles that I held most dear and I still own some of them today, residing in a glass jar containing marbles of memory. 

We stopped playing marbles some time in early adolescence. It was surely no longer cool and it seemed tedious and awkward to be crawling around on the floor. We literally outgrew the marbles and they were no longer the right scale for our play. When my kids were small we tried rolling marbles on the floor but it didn’t work as well for them, perhaps because I was too cautious with some of marbles that contained my cherished memories, as if a fracture or chip would somehow diminish the very best moments of my own childhood. Or perhaps because there were now new toys, invented by my contemporaries, that involved infrastructures specifically designed for use with marbles, plastic conglomerations way beyond the capacity of wooden blocks. My kids had remarkable marble towers and chutes and they loved playing with them. These were toys with ingenious architectures, designed for racing marbles down winding paths. 

I took my most cherished marbles, put them away in a glass jar, and gave the rest to the kids. I don’t know whether their marbles had the same magic as mine, or spun similar narratives. I never bothered to ask them. However, I know that my children (like countless others) were best left on their own to discover unique ways to play with their toys. I know they invented complex stories and characters, and learned similar lessons of scale and pattern, although not necessarily with marbles.

As I write this I’m sitting on the floor of our living room, my back propped against the low platform that holds the wood stove. There’s a tightly woven wool rug covering the floor. Its perfect for playing marbles. There’s an 8x8 area, bounded by couches and walls. With just a few modifications it could be a perfect marbles playing field. I’ve retrieved my childhood marbles and carefully spilled them onto the floor. They lie huddled in a nine inch diameter circle. There are exactly one hundred and fifty marbles. I took the time to count them, holding each one in my hand, reconnecting with the cumulative narratives. Yes, Grandpappy is here! He hasn’t aged a bit. The red, oversized catseye is here too! I don’t see Peewee or Whitey. Peewee was so small that he probably got lost. Whitey was just too generic and probably got swept up by some other game.

There are marbles here that I received as gifts. There’s a batch of lovely nineteenth century ceramic marbles. There are several oversize marbles, laced with interesting spiral patterns, designed so that if you roll them they take you on a whirring, spiraling journey. There’s a marble designed in the shape of a small globe with a map of the world imprinted on it. It’s a planet marble. You can roll the earth around in the living room! Yet as much as I admire these newer marbles, they just don’t move me as much as the ones that I used to play with. By playing with the marbles I entered their world, or at lest projected my identity onto marble play narratives. They were my extension, a means not just for exploring stories of childhood and early adolescence, but they provided me with a visceral understanding of space and time.

I notice the marbles that were my planets—Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Sitting elegantly in the midst of this lovely pile that now resembles so many things—a coagulation of planets, a multicellular organism, a weave of color and pattern. And there’s the green marble planet Neptune, at once a planet, and then the color of a swirling ocean on a cloudy day, that emerald silver-green you notice under the waves just as they crash to shore. I hold the marble up again and travel backward in time, back to childhood, and then outward in space to Neptune, and back to New England across the hills and valleys to the rocky shore of Maine to the timeless Atlantic as I once viewed it from Monhegan Island every May. This marble is now a portal to the way our planet might have looked several hundred million years ago when the continents were swirling on a restless ocean. I roll the marble across the room, gently with caution and reverence, and then I put it back with the others, in the marble community where it belongs. I roll the marbles all together, cradling them in my hands, watching their shifting shapes and colors. There are marbles that resemble the sky at dawn, small mountain lakes, city streets. There’s one that even resembles an old friend. I listen to the gentle clack of the marbles knocking together, blending with the wood chimes on my porch, punctuated by the crispy patter of rain falling on the roof. I pick each marble up, examine it, and then place it back in its resting place until such time, many months or years from now, when I will beg their reacquaintance.

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Why Choose a Sustainable Campus?

This article appeared as a blog post from College Express (June 2014)

I’ve participated in the college recruitment process from every conceivable angle. Most recently, when I was a college president, I would study our admissions numbers, assess our marketing and branding, and think about all of the ways that we could attract appropriate students to Unity College. Before that, as a parent, I went on numerous college tours and tried to offer the best advice to my daughter and son. Many years ago, almost fifty (gasp!) I was a high school student trying to figure out where to go.

Now, I travel the country far and wide, visiting numerous campuses, consulting about sustainability leadership. I write with great confidence that every campus I visit has distinguishing qualities, excellent staff and faculty, and a community that aspires to serve its students. Colleges and universities have different cultures, histories, missions, and specialties. Most of the time, a student will choose an institution based on finances (where can I afford to go?), location (where do I want to be?) identity (who am I and who do I want to be around?), program (what to I want to study?), and prospects (will my program lead to a job?)

If you are trying to figure out where you should attend college, I’d like to offer another factor that might help shape your choice. To what extent does a campus embody the principles of sustainability? I’ll start by explaining what sustainability is, and then explain why it’s essential for a twenty-first century education. Then I’ll provide some ways that you can determine whether it’s a campus priority.

Sustainability is ultimately a community vision, an aspiration that emphasizes meaningful work, reasonable comfort and security, a clean and safe environment, good health, and opportunities for personal growth. A sustainability ethos is an approach to living and learning that links these qualities to ecological awareness. It seeks to make those connections by calling attention to how personal actions and community practices affect the natural world. The concept of sustainability projects the good life and couples it to ecological conscience.

Increasingly, college and university campuses are embracing sustainability because it improves the quality of campus life. It’s a forward looking approach to energy, economics, community well-being, and technological innovation. A campus that takes sustainability seriously, both in its academic programs and in its master planning, is more likely to be a vibrant, caring, innovative, creative, and resilient place to live, work, and study.

When you attend college, you are exposed to countless ideas and opportunities. The so-called “co-curriculum” represents all of the learning that takes place outside the classroom—what you learn about living in a community, the people you meet and the relationships you develop, the food you eat, the clubs you join, the internships and jobs you experience. These are more than intangible benefits. They represent the heart and soul of living in a campus environment. When a campus has a rich portfolio of sustainability initiatives, you are more likely to be exposed to healthier food, community service opportunities, and a creative approach to lifestyle behaviors. In the twenty-first century, personal success will be measured by the extent to which you live a meaningful life in a sustainable community. Look for a campus that emphasizes these qualities, because it will prepare you for the experiences that will most matter in your future.

Increasingly, the sustainability ethos is permeating the standard curriculum. Business schools now have “green” MBA programs. Colleges of architecture, design, and planning promote sustainable approaches to their professions. Many undergraduate programs have required sustainability courses, or they are incorporated into traditional majors. You don’t have to major in sustainability studies to learn how to live a good life, or to get a great job. But a campus that emphasizes sustainability will have a curriculum that reflects those values, and it will better prepare you for the many challenges that lie ahead.

When you visit a campus, check out the extent to which sustainability initiatives are visible. Are there renewable energy installations? Is recycling evident? Does the cafeteria offer health and/or local choices? Is there an efficient transportation system? Are lots of folks riding bicycles? Do the buildings reflect the principles of sustainable design? Are there signs and exhibits that depict campus sustainability initiatives? Does the curriculum offer courses and programs that highlight sustainability?

There are many criteria that will ultimately determine where you choose to attend college. Hopefully, you will choose a campus that is preparing you for a great life and career, an institution that can change with the times, and equips you with the life skills to be a contributing community member. In my experience, one of the best ways to assess campus vitality, creativity, and excellence, is to observe whether its sustainability initiatives are woven into the fabric of campus life. Please keep that in mind as you think about your educational future.

 

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Golf

I am not a golfer. I appreciate the skill, challenge and aesthetics of the game. There are three reasons why I don’t play. First, if I have three hours to spend outdoors, I prefer aerobic activity. Second I am just not cut out for such an unforgiving sport. Third, I have my doubts about the ecological problems of golf as a land use activity. 

Nevertheless I admire golf as the ultimate landscape sport. To play well you have to study the contours of the landscape, its smoothness and roughness, its curves and lines, its sweeps and swerves—these micro-topographical variations are intrinsic to high quality golf course design and the requisite skill of the golfer. All good golfers are experts in micro-topographical interpretation, although the substance of their expertise is oriented exclusively towards how a small ball travels on the landscape, not the soil series, or the glacial geomorphology.

Golf shares an interesting structural similarity to pinball. You are trying to hit a ball into a small hole, steering it around and through obstacles, using ricochets to your advantage, using spins and slices. However they are on opposite ends of a spatial landscape scale. Golf is played over hundreds of yards, one hole can be almost a quarter of a mile. You are gauging the spaciousness of the field, navigating the ball within and through that spaciousness. Pinball is contained within three square feet, using multiple balls, navigating them through a crammed space, with many more artifacts of ricochet, obstacle, and pathway. Yet both hold a similar attraction for people who are interested in steering balls through interesting landscapes. Perhaps their similarities are most apparent in their simulacra, especially the computer, where the golf landscape is reduced in scale to the size of a screen and you flick your wrist to control the ball and navigate it accordingly. The computer screen is the meeting place of golf and pinball!

What’s the middle ground between a full-sized golf course and a pinball machine? Why it’s a miniature golf course, a landscape game that takes into account the best of both venues. With miniature golf you’re hitting a golf ball through space into a hole, but similar to pinball, the golfball is rarely (or shouldn’t be) airborne. It navigates many more obstacles and the artful ricochet is more crucial to success. If the miniature golf course is well designed, the ball will travel into some very unusual places and take on a life of its own. Your ball will travel an underground and overground trail, taking on shamanic significance, as it builds a narrative on its way to the final resting place, where it will sit, neatly nestled, finally arriving home.

I adore miniature golf. The scale of the game is perfect. It’s not as daunting as real golf where the small white ball is dwarfed by the enormity of the landscape, and I, for one, too easily get lost in the infinite possibilities of such boundlessness. Miniature golf is a cross between a sport and a board game. It requires dexterity, finesse, tactics, strategy, and luck. Unfortunately most miniature golf courses are either too much like golf, that is, they try to simulate the real thing and lack imagination, or they get carried away in some tacky narrative, mistaking silly statues and buildings for imaginative design. Really interesting and challenging miniature golf courses are rare.

All games of golf, real and miniature, strike me as both deeply serious and entirely frivolous. There are miniature golf championships. During the 1960s there were Putt-Putt courses which sponsored national matches, and even a few professionals. Of course real golf is replete with a finely stratified series of levels, expertise, professional organizations, and paraphernalia. Although I would never consider baseball or basketball frivolous (as humorous as they can be), because I take both games so seriously, I’m enough of a golf outsider that I can see the game as something of a fool’s errand, and on some level, absolutely ridiculous. I don’t mean this to be disrespectful. I am sure that if I viewed baseball or basketball in the same way, I would see them in an entirely different light. Watching eighteen men or women dressed in matching uniforms with team logos, throwing a ball at a bat and then running around to catch, throw it, and avoid being tagged, seems like a perfectly reasonable human activity to me. But watching a man or a woman standing quietly on a grassy knoll, trying to whack a small ball into a hole several hundred yards away at the other end of the field seems silly. And yet I can see myself, later in life, when all prospects of basketball have faded with age, taking up golf, and pursuing that same small white ball with the same depth of concentration, and even love, with which I now handle a basketball. The frivolity of any game is in the eye of the beholder. It serves us well to view all sports as simultaneously sacred and frivolous, secular and parochial, community minded and individualistic, meaningful and meaningless. 

As a critic of golf, I find the game too strident in its domestication of wild open space, too big to be a garden, too disruptive of local ecology, whereas baseball and basketball are more appropriately scaled. Golf conveys a form of nineteenth century privilege, steeped in enclosure, a perversely recreational fencing, fox hunts turned to golf carts. I know if I loved the game I wouldn’t feel this way, or I would just accept it as another sacrifice of the ecosystem. I know, too, that if I give myself another chance I could be pulled by this game too. In many respects it is the ultimate landscape game.

One day last winter I packed my cross-country skis into the car and took a ten minute drive to the Dublin Lake and Golf Club. It sits in a beautiful meadow in full view of the northern face of Mount Monadnock. I enjoy skiing on the golf course and using it as an entree to several miles of backcountry exploration. It was a lovely, crystal blue, mid-Winter day, a fresh February early morning sky. The snow and sun were not yet too bright. There was a brisk wind, covering the golf course with deep drifts and icy patches. I was alone on the golf course and the lack of tracks (or the restless wind) meant I would cut a new trail. Skiing this landscape is refreshingly inspiring, a pure blue sky against the white backdrop of fresh snow. The golf course is now a different kind of playing field, an open space, allowing me to explore the winter micro-topography, in the ecological and physiographic context of Mount Monadnock, the Laurentian forest, and the various animals tracks (deer, fox, coyote, snowshoe hare), all of whom traverse this landscape too. We mammals gather here at different times and places, searching for food, mates, or information.

In a few months the snow will melt and the golfers will return. This course is a private club. I’m sure if I played the right social networks I could score an invitation to play a few rounds of golf. But this is an exclusive club, ultimately beyond my economic pedigree, reflective of a particular class and attitude. I may bond with the landscape but I would feel vaguely out of place in its resident social network. Whenever I ride my bicycle through here on a summer day I’m glad to see the golfers with their clubs and carts. I hope their successes outweigh their frustrations. I hope they find solace, satisfaction, and companionship in both the golf game and the landscape. This wonderful place, whether it functions as a golf course, a cross country ski track, an avenue for wildlife, or a nesting place for birds, is a playing field on an ecological landscape.

Humans will always find ways to steer balls through space. It’s just an archetypal thing. There are few better ways to challenge the mind and body than playing with balls—throwing them, catching them, steering them—watching them roll, fly, bounce, and ricochet. It’s inherently interesting. My explanation is simple. It’s a magnificent way to better understand the ecological landscape through a playful, physical extension of the human body. Wherever I am, and I hope wherever you are, wherever humans go, I know that we will all find ways to play with balls in space and time.

I hope that some day someone will design an ecological golf course, not just a place with organic greens, devoid of pesticides, serving whole foods in the lounge, but a playing field that mindfully balances the domestic and the wild, where people play in teams, running through the landscape, rolling throwing and striking balls together, scoring points and overcoming obstacles, and while doing so are observing, identifying with, and immersing themselves in the very biospheric processes which make their play possible. They explore a playing field that merges humanity with the biosphere—rolling balls down hills, around city corners, across watercourses, lifting them high in the air and back again, rebounding off trees and buildings, until they return to their resting places, a neatly dug hole, a home plate, a goal post or a rim and hoop perfectly designed to receive the gift that was meant for it.

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Commentary Gwarlingo Studio Commentary Gwarlingo Studio

Dublin, NH: Four Weeks Later

Although I returned to Dublin on May 26th, three weeks after my initial departure, it took me a week to settle in, get organized, and recalibrate.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate the extraordinary proliferation of biomass in the month of May is to juxtapose some photographs. Check out these before and afters:

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While traveling West I observed the pace of Spring in different regions of the country. But my only real marker for contrasting the changes (after all, I was just passing through) is my home place in the Monadnock Region of Southwest New Hampshire.

The vastness of the North American continent is extraordinary. And despite globalization, interdependence, and the Internet, the variety of landscapes and habitats (though surely not what it once was) is remarkable and inspiring. I enjoyed every landscape. I never tired of observing the scenery. In the Midwest, on my bicycle and from the car I observed the intimacy and diverse topography of what at first glance seems relatively flat. There are rolling hills, rises and bends, watercourses and levees, glacial marks, sand dunes, and all manner of geomorphological intricacies. And when the landscape is inescapably flat you have the everchanging and enchanting great sky. Every region has it's unique beauty and there is so much more to discover. The Mountain West is dynamic and daunting. There was way too much for me to take in. The daily bicycle rides literally grounded me in a discipline of sensory awareness, taking the landscape in at a reasonable pace and scale.

And the I fly home in one fell swoop, on a night flight from San Francisco to Boston. I peeked out the window just a few minutes before landing, but other than those brief glimpses of Eastern Massachusetts I saw nothing. What a contrast. We sacrifice way too much in our worship of speed. 

I am glad to be in one place for awhile. I am savouring the slower pace of watching the end of Spring and the beginning of Summer.

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