Geography of the James (Earth Lodge)

Where to start? Looking back on this semester in our Geography of the James class, I can honestly say that I have never taken a course quite like this here at the University of Richmond, or even throughout middle and high school. It is refreshing to be enrolled in a course that takes this sort of “hands on” approach to learning. My expectations for this class coming in to the semester were plagued with thoughts of 3 hour lectures about the history of the James river and about the watershed in general, but I was happily surprised to find out that we would be taking class trips to places such as Belle Isle and Henricus Park to see and learn about the James and its history first-hand.

I felt emerged in this hands-on style of learning right from our first class during the first week of the semester. What is usually described as “syllabus week” for most classes, where the protocol is usually a meet and greet scenario where little learning is actually done, our class instead took some time to walk around the outskirts of our campus to learn about and see the two main inflows of water that feed into Westhampton lake. The general consensus from everyone in our class was that no one had actually been to these parts on campus nor had anyone truly given much thought as to where the water that flows into our lake comes from. Even though the majority of our class has been on this campus for at least three semesters, it is baffling to think that no one had ventured out to these parts of campus before. After his encounter, I realized that I tend to overlook what is right in front of me, and don’t stop to think about questions such as, “how did this get here” or “where is this coming from,” as often as I should.

One of the first assignments we had in this class was to search for a reflection spot that would serve as a familiar place to sit and observe on campus throughout the semester. What I thought would be an easy task, due to the always-beautiful scenery throughout our entire campus, proved to be a rather difficult quest where I yearned for the most perfect reflection point that I could possibly find. This was a valuable lesson for me because it reminded me to not lose focus on the little wonders of life that lie right before me. I was too preoccupied with focusing on the manmade distractions that I didn’t view as part of the nature around me than appreciating what is right in front of me. I believe that this aspect of not being completely in the moment and appreciating all that is around me has been a common theme in my writing so far throughout the semester. I have been too bogged down by this idea that nature is this untouched and unhindered region of space, and have struggled to realize that nature is relative. I dove deeper into this idea after reading the article by William Cronon as he discuss a similar idea on the views of nature in our society.

A major concept that we have covered in class and have all reflected on is the importance of water, starting in our local communities and spreading to a global perspective as well. Growing up, I had been somewhat aware of the significance of water and how essential and vital it is to human life and survival, but I had not reflected on how water has influenced my life, and had not fully understood the interconnectedness that water brings to societies throughout the world. The first revelation I had about water this semester was when we were discussing watersheds. Before the Geography of the James class, I honestly did not know what exactly a watershed was. The idea that you can separate borders and boundaries by watersheds and that watersheds can be broken down from giant seas and lakes to even a bathtub astonished me. I found it incredibly interesting reading all of my classmates’ blog posts about their hometown rivers and the impact that the rivers had on each and everyone’s lives. I have been able to recognize more and more the importance and functions that watersheds such as rivers have and continue to provide us no matter where we are.

The concept of watersheds also ties in with an important discussion that we had early in the semester about place and region. I have thought a lot about how a specific area gains an identity after this discussion and other discussions we had in class. I have seen, especially in the examples and excerpts from the book we are reading, In River Time, that watersheds such as the James River help define a specific place or region. For example, Native Americans who lived by the James saw their lives and daily routines become intertwined with the James, and ultimately, became aware that their survival depended on the James. Watersheds such as this have become more and more a defining symbol and aspect of many major cities around the globe, and as my classmates and I have discovered, these same watersheds can help express a feeling of “home.”

I have had to do frequent blog postings for other classes over my time here at UR, but none similar to this. I consider these posts to be more of personal journal entries. I used to keep a private journal when I was in high school, writing down favorite quotes I had come across in books, movies, or lectures, and tried to make sense of those quotes on paper. This blog post experience for this course has opened my eyes to a new form of journaling. I am especially excited and intrigued about the reflection spot posts, because they allow me to see and reflect upon the changes that take place over time of a specific area on campus. I am almost certain that without this “assignment” for this course, I would probably never take the time to sit down in the same location on multiple occasions and just write what I see, hear, and feel. I believe this is an important process and experience, and hopefully one that I will continue to implement in my life as I move forward.

This year I have been thinking a lot about the environment and the responsibilities we all have to protect and preserve it. Last year I was swept off my feet by a charismatic Green Peace representative, and for the first time I found myself actively working to spread awareness of environmental issues. Although I largely look back on this as a mildly embarrassing phase of my transition into adulthood, I cannot deny that my brief involvement in environmental activism was responsible for many of my most educational and rewarding experiences in college. In truth, sometimes I wonder why I became disenchanted to begin with and certainly why I feel so silly about it in retrospect. I guess people generally look at Green Peace (as well as many other radical NPOs) and see crazy progressives preying on student’s naïve idealism. A lot of people look at it and see largely uneducated kids marching around the streets being obnoxious to much more realistic adults who scoff and say, “When you’re older you’ll see how the real world works”. As I mentioned in last week’s post, there is certainly some truth to this. A lot of times I felt like I was organizing and planning for the sake of being busy, then doing pointless protests so that we could take pictures to put on Facebook. It’s not I gave up on environmentalism altogether, or that I see the fight as useless… I just wasn’t sure that I was going about it in the right way. In fact, the main reason I’ve drifted is because I decided it was only worth it if I decided to dedicate my career to it – which I was not. I felt like I would never make an impact worth the effort unless I made it a full time occupation.

While rereading these blog posts, I’ve realized that environmentalism isn’t something one can really give up once they’ve become privy to it. I’ve realized that environmentalism is largely a state of mind, a perspective and a lifestyle. Of course, this is definitely different than being an activist, but this simple realization has suddenly made environmental activism feel a lot more accessible to me. Last week Meeps talks about the film Chasing Ice, and how James Balog wanted to show climate change to his viewers. Anytime anyone mentions the EFF, that film comes up; everyone who saw it loved it and everyone who missed it is regretful. I think environmentalism, in particular climate change, is often an incredibly abstract concept to people. It was exactly this abstraction that left me feeling disconnected from what I was trying to do with Green Peace. That’s why the film works so well. It isn’t trying to convince people through statistics, because to a certain extent almost anyone who reads them doesn’t really understand them. Instead he’s just showing footage of the actual effects – He’s trying to show people something that’s otherwise inaccessible, give people a connection to something that he thinks is in need of attention.

In this week’s post, Anne talks about how this class has made her more inquisitive and attentive to her everyday ecological systems. I would most certainly agree, and I’m beginning to think that this attentiveness is the most important thing we can foster as environmentalists. What I found the most frustrating about Green Peace is that so often we were met with people who simply didn’t care. People found our activism to be crazy, they found us to be hippies. I wasn’t frustrated by the insults, I was frustrated because I honestly couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t care. I now realize that no amount of protesting would get these people to care. They don’t care because they don’t understand; they simply haven’t been exposed to nature in the same way that I’ve been privileged to. In our first open topic post, a lot of us wrote about our bodies of water at home. While writing about his creek, Bestie wrote the simplest thing that stuck out to me. He ended with a resolute acknowledgement: “[Eighteen Mile Creek] has been a big part of my life”. I think that’s ultimately something that brings a lot of us Earth Lodgers together; we have grown up around nature, nature is part of who we are, and at the end of the day we will probably never stop caring for it.

I then have to ask myself, is caring enough? Is having this relationship changing anything? Of course the answer to both of these questions is yes. How can anyone be expected to take care of the environment if they don’t understand it? The other day Carey Jamieson from the school of continuing studies came to our GreenUR meeting. We were talking about Nature Deficit Disorder and she told us a story about watching a kid cry because he was scared of a sparrow. Spending her entire life on a farm, she was flabbergasted that a child didn’t understand that sparrows are harmless. Can we blame the child? Of course not; just as we can’t really blame people for not caring more. They just need to be shown why it’s important. Like how Bleach explains his first conceptualization of light pollution. He was only concerned about the detrimental effects of civilization because he was privileged to live in a place left largely unaffected. It was his relationship and love for Maine’s unadulterated starscape that made him recognize the importance of environmental attentiveness. I mean, can we really expect people to care that the birds don’t chirp anymore when they never heard them to begin with?

I guess this brings me back to William Cronon’s article that we read a few weeks ago. The duality we create between man and nature really is problematic. Nature is everywhere just as the effects of man are everywhere. We’re so intertwined that we can no longer think of the two as separate. In George’s post “Rivers and Roads”, he talks about this new landscape we’ve created. But I think it’s easy to be much more attentive to manmade structures than to nature. We experience objects through their utility, and it’s easy to take the little brook running by the road for granted. We’re only willing to notice when it’s our backyard or a sublime view of Zion Canyon; we forget that our happiness is much more reliant on the chorus of birds in the morning, the frogs at night, the stars, the feel of moss under our feet – then it is on things that we are so much more vocal about, like broken doorknobs or potholes.

So where do I go from here? I’m making it a goal to continue to be more and more attentive to the world around me. Taylor talks about working at the William Byrd Community House’s farmlet, and I was really inspired. He writes of being surprised how unintuitive a lot of his work was; like pruning plants by almost half in order to urge them to grow more, or mixing poor soil in with the compost to avoid creating an impenetrable bubble for the plant. I want to involve myself with nature in a hands on way, so that I can actually understand how it work. I think this new level of attentiveness would help me better comprehend the natural world around me, better recognize when it is healthy and when things are afoul. It’s like when people ask me if I care whether other people eat meat. It’s not that I think everyone should be vegetarian, I just think everyone should understand where their meat is coming from, and then decide whether they’re comfortable supporting that.

It’s not that I think everyone should dedicate their life to environmentalism, I mean I’m not. I just think everyone should try to at least recognize – try to see for themselves – that we are part of a system that all have a stake in. And for me, opening opportunities for people to forge such relationships is probably more rewarding than any other sort of advocacy I can think of. As Jenni wrote two weeks ago, Earth Lodge has the potential to help demystify the natural world for our community as a whole.

During our hike at Henricus Park this past weekend, what struck me the most was that humans had found a way to directly alter the flow of a major waterway like the James River, to literally bend such a significant landform to better serve our transportation needs. I’ve seen dams, mountaintop removal sites, and countless other illustrations of the edits humanity makes to its natural surroundings by sheer physical force—but after a semester focusing on what an integral role the James has played in shaping our area’s history and identity, witnessing firsthand the way we’ve exercised our own forces to alter the shape of the James itself was bizarre and illuminating. In class, we’ve discussed the paradox of life centered around a river, but we’re constantly encountering new manifestations of it.

The power dynamic between a community and its river is ambiguous and endlessly intriguing. We rely on the James for our most fundamental survival, but we impose our technological superiority over the natural forces that shape it, so that its movements and ours become inextricably tied. Living and studying in a community like this, it’s easy to recognize the river’s significance in our lives, and our significance in its life, and begin to take that mutuality for granted. But we can’t lose sight of how far away even a city like Richmond remains from a widespread, genuine understanding of our place in the James River watershed. In one of my blog posts, I responded to a Collegian article about one student’s relationship with the James. It’s a stunning example of the trepidation and fundamental misunderstandings with which many Richmonders approach the James. Not everyone looks forward to an afternoon out on the water, but to leave unacknowledged the integral role the river (and water, more broadly) plays in our community’s livelihood is like denying the importance of infrastructure, or air, or light—counter-productive and counter-intuitive.

We can’t study our watershed community’s relationship with its river without considering its relationship with water in general. Our reading on The Science of Hydrology points out that in developed nations like the US, we take potable and accessible water almost entirely for granted. Not only does this mean that we don’t tend to acknowledge our dependence on these resources, but it also leaves many of us with minimal regard for our own actions’ effect on the water that surrounds us. I see it all the time from my reflection spot on the bridge—casual tosses into the lake of cigarettes, half-empty beer cans (not to mention half-full beer cans), and bicycles, and everything in between. And even beyond our more visually obvious acts of destruction to Westhampton Lake, it seems clear that our campus has a long way to go before it achieves a truly harmonious relationship with its liquid environment.

Working at ETC, I have a rare window into the general UR student mind, which seems not to understand very clearly where its water comes from. I don’t think there’s a single item I sell more frequently than giant plastic bottles of SmartWater, because it contains magical delicious electrolytes that will render the drinker, yes, smart, and because it comes in a shiny package and is therefore much cleaner than tap water. “I can taste the difference,” customers say. “I can feel the difference. Tap water is dirty. Tap water is dangerous.” SmartWater’s label boasts that its product is taken directly from the clouds, pure as can be. Where do its die-hard fans think the rest of our planet’s water comes from? And why are they convinced that our city’s tap water is harmful? Municipal water sources are quality-tested multiple times a day—I’ve been chugging tap water since I arrived in Richmond and I feel pure as can be. Rural towns in developing nations feel incredibly fortunate to have one public source of potable water for the whole community to share, and here in an environment in which we have virtually limitless access to drinkable water we regard it with fear, spending extra money and adding harmful plastics to our watershed’s burden to avoid it.

I hope I don’t come off as indignant for indignation’s sake (I generally work mornings at ETC so every water bottle I sell is also infused with an all-pervading grumpiness that’s entirely unrelated). Part of the value of this course itself, for me, is recognizing how little I truly understand about hydrology, about the concept of a watershed, about place. It can be easy to feel like I walk among the enlightened ones around here (We Terracycle, my friends. Fight the good fight.), but then we stroll for ten minutes around the campus I call home and I discover a creek I’ve never heard of before. I’ve got so much to learn about my place, and about ways we can conceptualize place itself—I’m really looking forward to developing in my understanding of our identity as watershed inhabitants as the semester goes on.

One facet of this continuing discovery of my habitat will be the final project we’re about to start working on. I’ve signed up to focus on bicycle trail options. I’m not a serious cyclist by any means, but I’ve grown up spending my summers in a tiny town in which bikes and feet are truly the primary modes of transportation. I love that atmosphere, and I hope I can contribute to the development of more bicycle and pedestrian resources in RVA. But one aspect of the project that really excites me is the opportunities a more extensive trail network could yield for UR students to discover their natural surroundings, to question their role in their habitat’s continued healthy functioning, and to grow as a campus community in our understanding of water and watersheds. I can’t wait to see where this project will lead, beginning this week with our discussion with Jakob Helmboldt, the city’s coordinator for bicycle and pedestrian initiatives.

At the beginning of the semester, I viewed campus as simply a network of paths and buildings and my only thoughts were about how to get from place to place.  My thoughts about our campus did not go much beyond that.  Some days the lake would be beautiful and I would pay some attention to it, but most of the time it was simply an obstacle to navigate around.  This semester I am taking classes in the fields of leadership, rhetoric, and geography; these were not subjects that I anticipated would overlap at all at the beginning of the semester.  Back then being at Richmond, to me, was the farthest thing from nature; it was just an 8 month distraction from my mountain home.  In the last two months my views of campus and my thinking in class have changed greatly.

During the first Geography of the James class two questions were asked that really helped me start relating the University of Richmond to nature, similar to the type of nature that I associated with camping and hikeing.  The first question was, where is north?  If you dropped me anywhere in the 214 square miles of Philmont mountains I could answer that question in no time, but for some reason I was surprised that I did not have an immediate reaction when that question was asked with respect to campus where I live for the majority of my year.  The second question was what did the moon look like last night?  In the summer not a single night goes by where I do not look up at the sky and see amazing stars and the moon.  It struck me that when at Richmond I almost never take the time to look at the sky.  Perhaps this is because the stars are practically non-existent, but the moon can be seen every night and it shocked me to think that I have detached this element of connection to nature from my daily life.  Since that first class I have opened my mind to all the ways that UR is part of nature that we are learning about in class.

Through looking at maps and touring campus in our class I have a much better idea of the geography of our campus.  I now feel like if I were asked at most points on campus to close my eye I would be able to point to which direction other locations are.  I can think beyond trees and hills and visualize the campus so much better now.  I also feel I understand and visualize the ecological community on campus better now.  In seeing the campus watershed and reflecting on the lake I have begun to view it less as an aesthetic part of campus and more as an ecosystem and I now view the nature on campus in a direct way.  Despite the buildings and the paths I can see the rainfall and plants in the same way I would view them in the mountains.  For example, I never used to notice that there was a slight current in our lake and I never thought about where the water in the lake came from or where it out-flowed.

I also feel I have become a more inquisitive thinker as a result of this class.  I have never been very interested in museums or learning about plant species or asking questions about ecology.  When I have worked in New Mexico I have always focused on knowing the bare minimum in this aspect but recently I have wished I had much more knowledge of how smaller ecologic systems work.  This semester I’ve found myself being much more observant and more likely to ask questions.  Even silly ones, such as “why are worms always on the cement when it rains?” or “how do dolphins breathe?”  I went on a park clean up last weekend and kept picking up things like discarded glass jars or deer skulls and looking at the moss and other things growing on them and questioning how long they might have been there.  I think this has a great deal to do with having a reflection spot this semester and being forced to stop and look at smaller things.  As a backpacker I have always been interested in miles and summits and views so even when I’m in very remote and beautiful areas I can easily forget to stop and look at smaller ecological elements.  Its been a lot like going back to childhood where everything you see sparks a question and that ok.  I think over the years I’ve begun to be selective about my brain power because of how difficult school has become but I think asking questions that do not relate to a class assignment specifically is actually important and I’m finding it very fun.

I have also found that all of the academic subjects I am taking are beginning to blend together. I can no longer only focus on one side of things.  When I was sent to a leadership conference by the Jepson School hearing the leadership of a man who organized a very large oil spill clean up I began to question the ecological aspects of what he was saying.  In my Critical thinking class a discussion started on resource management and my knowledge of ground water and aquifers from Geography of the James became very important to developing a good argument.  Also, as an upperclassman ambassador for Westhampton College Outdoor Adventure I’ve used my new knowledge of the Richmond area to help teach the girls I work with about the ecology of the area, particularly the James River. This class and the activities we have done this semester have not only increased my knowledge of ecology and geography but have made me a more aware and inquisitive member of the campus and greater Richmond communities.