Over this past semester I tried to focus on scale, connectivity, and boundaries as they applied to my life here inside the Richmond bubble. These three ideas are fundamental components of physical geography, and furthermore, you can’t look at one of them in isolation; they are all part of the same cohesive network. In much the same way that you can’t eat cheese balls without coating your fingers in artificial powder, you can’t look at the scale of something without also reconciling its boundaries and how it connects to the larger picture. It just doesn’t follow. Looking back on my previous blog posts of the semester, this seems to be my primary problem; I tried to focus on each of these individual aspects while largely neglecting the whole.
In my reflection post “The ants go marching one by one…,” I focused largely on scale and compared the dynamics of an ant colony to that of human civilization. Humans and ants are really not that different, at least in terms of bare bones social structures. In fact, there are even some behavioral psychology labs that are trying to understand human interactions by looking at ant colonies. I ended my post by admiring the ant’s ability to work in a mutualistic fashion with surrounding species and encouraged humans to scale up this idea by stating, “if these small annoying insects can do it, surely we can do it bigger and better.” Although I focused on the positive aspects of ant-plant mutualism, there was a distinct lack of boundaries in this post. There are some places that ants cannot function and there are some places that Humans cannot go. It is dangerous to assume that you can scale something up without first considering the boundaries you may overstep. Lucy infers this hazard in her post “Reactions.” She says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Taking a good idea with relatively minor problems and scaling it up enhances both the good and the bad. These factors need to be accounted for.
Consequently, my blog post “Blowing in the Wind” focused extensively on boundaries while letting connectivity and scale fall to the wayside. The entire entry is about losing your bearings in nature and being unsure of where nature ends and you physically begin. The stream-of-consciousness-esque writing and lack of paragraphs is supposed to signify how everything molds together and you can’t tell where one thing ends and the other begins. While it is nice to look at isolated situations like this, I’m missing out on what’s going on in the world at large. Although the boundaries in this one microecosystem may be diminished, the world is made up of literally billions of these sites where each one is unique to observe. The obvious answer is to scale up the amount of observed ecosystems, but as I said before there seems to be some hazard with that.
When I wrote my first community service related blog, “When I was young I played with bubble wrap,” I focused on the idea of connectivity. That is, how am I connected to the local community around me? I wrote a lot about how good it felt to get involved with a project and actually do something with my Saturday morning. After learning from Mathew, however, that it was probable that a single rock could set the whole greenhouse project back a few hours, I was a little disheartened. I began to question what overall good I accomplished by volunteering my four hours of time at the Farmlet. I asked myself, how connected could I be to a place when I barely know the community around me? Yet, when asking these questions I posed them with a very short scope. I thought only about this one isolated effort to build a greenhouse. I had no regard for the scale or boundaries of my small action. For example, I would not be the only volunteer working on this greenhouse project; someone else would come along after me and pick up where I left off. In the grand scheme of things, my work mattered. I was very much a part of the completion of that building; the scale of the project is bigger than I had originally thought. Shannon posted a helpful comment on my blog where she said, “While obviously I don’t like the idea of vandalism, nobody does, I find myself inclined to care more about that type of real-world, immediately addressable issue than the academic work I’m doing here.” Here she’s saying that it is better to be connected to the world, despite these minor set backs, than it is to be isolated in our own academic coma. It is better to break down certain societal boundaries than to remain content. These are implications that I never would have thought of with the simple task of assembling windowpanes.
Throughout this semester long journey I have learned about boundaries, scale, and connectivity in a stepwise fashion. Now, finally, at the end of the course, I believe that I am able to look at them all at the same time to understand the full scope of the problem. The VCU Rice Center is a good example. The center serves as a waypoint that connects ecologists and policy makers. It provides a place for ecologists to research the James River and then, through its academic collaborations and connections with law and policy firms, present the data to the right people. It is very connected, and in that sense, because these kinds of things don’t work in isolation, it breaks down boundaries. The Rice Center focuses on providing a LEED platinum model, raising environmental awareness, and conducting wetland and river research. By not limiting itself to one area of focus, the center is unbound. They are able to scale their interests by researching anything from a small aquatic population to big tidal waters.
These ideas all cumulated for me, though, with the gambles mill trail project. I learned about how important communication, knowledge, and passion really are for good leadership. I learned about how on the edge properties, ecological boundaries are blurred as water carries nutrients from one place to another regardless of arbitrarily drawn lines. I learned how my land use is connected and impacts these small local watersheds I live in. I learned ways of how proper storm water management could be scaled up or down to fit individual hydrologic systems. But most importantly, I learned that a small effort could make a big difference in raising awareness and changing my place.