Geography of the James (Earth Lodge)

“The only constant is change.”
Whoever’s wise words can claim this statement hit on a goldmine. I am struck over and over again how everything is constantly changing around me, and that it is the only consistency between these varieties of events. Along with this change comes growth and progress, sometimes, and that is what I feel has come along with this year. There has been constant change: study abroad, old things dying out, new things coming into play, new friendships and new flavors to life. I feel like this year has matured me in ways I hadn’t thought imaginable, and now I no longer shy away from being called an “adult.” However,(!) I think it is important to make the distinction between an adult and a grown-up. These two things are entirely different entities to be understood. One is maturity, one is rigid stuffiness. I hope to never be a grown up, but yet always to be becoming more of an adult.

Looking back on my blogs, part of this maturity I have seen growing in me is the understanding of the responsibility laid upon my shoulders. I talk about this in my mid-term synthesis, that I can’t”be a passive agent any longer. WE are empowered, we are educated about what’s going on, we’ve seen the trash, the need for the community garden, the effects of man not living in harmony with the environment, what are we going to be doing about it? How are we going to fight apathy in all levels of our lives?”

We are responsible. If we want a more sustainable campus, city and nation, it does nothing to sit back and criticize instead of getting involved. It is much harder to get involved. This is a valuable lesson I learned from this year and will continue to apply in my travels and studies abroad. Getting involved and hands-on is critical to learning and growth, especially in connection to a topic like the environment.

In my blog “The Wondrous Cicada Larvae,” I talk about how studies have shown that people are more likely to pollute if they see that other have done the same. This is part of the reason why it is so important everything that we do to be good stewards of the environment around us. Humans are hopelessly social creatures, and take cues from the people around them about what is good and bad and what they should and should not do. If there are people living out environmentally ethical conclusions they have made, other people notice and follow suit. That is what is beautiful about following through with convictions- people recognize authenticity and have a desire to follow. People see a conviction of responsibility and the active will to carry this conviction out and are drawn to it.

However, I think Phoebe puts it well when she says that, “though it is important to be environmentally conscious and resist the devastation of our earth, it is also important to have a healthy love of humanity that does not ‘turn responsibility into self-hatred.’ Though I normally don’t think of humans as existing outside of the natural world, I have been torn as to how to reconcile my love for nature with the human destruction and development that I benefit from and take part in every day.”

In order to get people to love and care about the environment, it takes more than a demonstration of your commitment to sustainability and your authenticity in your practices of it. It requires relationship and love for others to effectively institute sustainable change within a given issue. The issue can sometimes be strong enough to hold groups of people together, but there is really something about how people are connected through relationships that can propel an idea or movement forward from that. This is something I have grown in my understanding of not only at our EL service sites but my other service sites in Richmond as well.

Another theme I notice running through my posts is how people are affected by the environment around them and how this causes people to react. In both my posts “the rain…ahh a familiar environment” and “Itchy eyes, beautiful dogwoods,” I am in some way talking about how affected I am by the weather. It can dictate the way a day goes, no? If you don’t have a terribly rigid schedule, on a rainy day, you can pull a Shannon and heat up some Easy Mac and curl up to Modern Family; but if its sunny, your day will look dramatically different. I mention in one of the posts how people’s relationships are affected by the changes in weather, and how fascinating this is. I haven’t noticed the correlation between the weather in any other place but here, and part of me wonders if it is because the weather is so alive, and people are connected to things that are living and changing as they are. The seasons are clearly defined. The trees respond in joy to the awakenings of spring, and their moods clearly follow in accordance with how the seasons say they must go. Not only this, but the weather is temperamental and can fluctuate like that great friend you have that sometimes gets into the strangest of moods, so it is difficult to not relate to it. It has a personality and life, which is something people are drawn to.

Finally, to conclude, looking back on Earth Lodge as a whole and over the year, it carries a slight ineffability to it. I don’t know exactly how to put my experience into words, except knowing that it was altogether very good. I like how Caroline puts it in her final synthesis. She says that,

“The experience that Earth Lodge has given us this year are not merely adventures and memories; they are tools that we will be able to use throughout the rest of our lives in order to continue the journey of both self-growth and protection of the world that surrounds us.”

This is part of the ineffability of Earth Lodge: how do you describe something that is so deeply a part of you? Sometimes it feels almost impossible to step outside of that and see things for their nature and their tangible effect on you. Caroline describes it also as a “process” and I whole-heartedly agree. We went through a lot together over this last year, and we well never be the same from the experience because it has taught us how to look at the world in a whole new way, which changes you forever.

For our Earth Lodge initiation, I was required to find quotes that represent my Earth Lodge experience and include it in a notebook. There were many things I wanted my quotes to include: The interesting things about the environment I’ve learned in class, the great connections I have made with fellow Earth Lodgers, the community service, etc. I had a tough time finding quotes that summarize each of these experiences.  It was at that point I realized that I’ve been ignoring the connection between the different experiences over my past year in earth lodge. The experiences I’ve gained through earth lodge are all interconnected and should be combined instead of singled out. Sometimes being too focused on one aspect of my experience made me forget about the other important aspects of my experiences; often time taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture would improve my experiences significantly.

Community service is not only a way improve the surrounding we live in, it is also a way to make connections with the community. For my second community trip, I went to Belle Isle to pick up trash.  In my blog post, I talked about how I found cigarette butts and stickers near the river. I then proceeded to talk about how cigarette butts are not decomposable and are harmful to the environment and the social implications of green organizations focusing too much on their goal, and not realizing the sacrifice that they’re making to archive their goal. There were a few other Earth Lodgers on the same trip as me, however, their reaction to the trip were very different. In Carolyn’s post, she mentioned “several members of the community … approached us and thanked us for our work”. Carolyn then concludes that all these little things demonstrated how much Earth Lodge as well as the community are in love with our place. Somehow over the 4 hours service trip, I put all my focus on the negative impacts of littering and made assumptions about how most people don’t care about the environment; I failed to notice that people are actually thankful for what I was doing and make meaningful connection with the community. I learned all the facts and science behind cigarette butts and contributed my part to improve the local community. However, I did not connect to the local community, which is a big part of community service.

Community service is also highly connected to learning. For my first service trip to the William Byrd farm, a farm that aims to bridge the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the Richmond area, I worked on different projects and got to know my supervisor very well. Through talking to my supervisor, Matthew, I learned so much about the William Byrd farm. I also learn valuable lesson about life. In my first service blog post, I talked about how Matthew’s view on life greatly differed from my views of life. I learned that a simple lifestyle can mean a lot more than a life of luxury with the help of passion and purpose. During the same service trip, Mike also noticed that there were a lot of vandalisms going on in the neighborhood around the William Byrd farm and questioned if the things he was doing were worth it. In a later blog post, he stated 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”. Often time, I find myself in the same situation as Mike, questioning if I am being too idealistic or what I’m doing really is worthwhile. There will always be some kind of set back to different situations, however, we should not stop trying just because of these minor set backs. What we learn from community service should not only be things like how to build a bee house or how to weed out grass, we should go above and beyond and interpret what community service really means. Improving the community is not the only goal for community service; we should also reach out and learn from people around us.

Knowledge also plays an important role in the larger picture. In one of my previous reflection blog posts, I talked about how I started to appreciate the connection between science and nature. Science and nature used to be completely separate entities to me, for some reason I thought that understanding science would ruin the nature of things. I was wrong; the connection between nature and science is strong. Adrienne had the same experience as me, she noted in her blog post that “As a later learner of different species, memorizing the physical characteristics of thirty local trees initially seemed daunting, but it soon became my favorite topic to study. With each tree I learned, I enjoyed walking around campus more”. It is important to combine science with its environmental applications when studying them.  Despite the obvious relationship between nature and the knowledge of science, there is also a strong connection between nature and friendship. Nature has the power to bring people together, the strong bonds of earth lodge formed on the trails of Belle Isle, the banks of the James and the trips to the mountains. The knowledge of science helped us appreciate nature more and therefore created stronger connections between earth lodgers. Knowledge is an essential part of meaningful connections.

There are also things that I can learn from the fellow earth lodgers. The day to day interaction I have with earth lodgers not only contributed to the strong bond I have with them, I also learn something new from them every day. In one of Mike’s previous posts, he gave me the idea of letting things go and taking it easy. Over the course of the semester, there are many other moments that I am inspired by fellow earth lodgers, Carolyn starts her day at 6 in the morning and go to bed very early, Josh’s healthy eating habits and Mark’s enthusiasm for our service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, etc. All these little things that Earth Lodgers do every day inspire me and encourage me to improve myself every day. Through these connections, I learned so much and it is very fulfilling.

My Earth Lodge experience can never divided into unrelated subgroups of experience. Sometimes I fail to see all the details between my experiences, however, it is important to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.  My earth lodge experience is a very integrative and rewarding experience and there are many connections between different experiences, we learn through service, make meaningful connection through service and knowledge, and learn from our meaningful connection with people. I have learned a tremendous amount from my Earth Lodge experience and I am very thankful to have this experience.

Anyone who’s grown up near a body of water can attest to the gradual and unalterable dependency that develops between a sea, bay, lake, or river and its denizens.  Everyone has their own explanations as to why this is, but I believe it’s primarily owing to the quality of water as moving and alive, which allows those who interact with it to experience by extension its perpetual shifts and flows.  Living near a body of water, you can’t help but begin to calibrate yourself to the erratic patterns of its same inconstant cycles.  We as changeable beings living in a largely unpredictable world can relate to water and its capricious, enigmatic flow.  Over the past few years, I’ve experienced significant changes in my life.  At their core, these changes can be traced back to the places I’ve lived and, naturally, the Chesapeake Bay and the James River—the aquatic bodies that characterize them.  Now, as I look back on my time near the James, I draw closer and closer to my time near a new river, the Tiber, and what changes that may mean in the very near future.

Growing up next to the Chesapeake Bay, my life revolved around the rhythm of rising and falling of salty green tides.  But, when I left for college two years ago, I left that body of water that had defined me and nurtured me for 18 years to embrace the James River, an entirely new body of water.  These past two years on the banks of the James have been a time of immeasurable growth and change as I expanded my aquatic enculturation westward from the Bay and into the churning brown water of the River.  Over the course of our study of geography of the James River, I’ve come to understand more about my environment, its connectivity, and myself by learning to better understand the James. 

Working for three days to clean up one of the parks in the James River watershed was one of my more notable learning experiences this past semester.  In “Three Days on the Isle” I described this experience and the conclusions I reached as a result.  After watching trash and litter return to the site day after day, I was made aware of the intense sense of protectiveness I felt for the river and the local environment in general.  I realized then that cleaning up the riverbank was important because the riverbank is connected to the river, which is connected to the city, which is connected to the people I love and the life I’ve built here.  Those three days helped me understand connectivity in a way I hadn’t considered yet—a way that made me more mindful of the far-reaching effects of any action, detrimental or beneficial.

A second influential experience this semester was the revisiting of my reflection spot, a small garden on campus.  Coupled with my increased awareness of the connectivity of the watershed, the habitual observance of a single spot helped me learn to tune in to my environment more than I was previously in the habit of doing.  After rereading and comparing my three past posts on this subject, “The Secret Garden,” “Time Stops,” and “The Habit of Looking Up,” I noted a trend moving toward a natural consciousness that I previously couldn’t claim.  After researching and witnessing the function of this watershed as a collective whole, I think it was only right that the next step in my process of growth was to learn to perceive and appreciate the minute workings of this complex system. 

Conclusively, living along the James has helped me achieve a new cognizance of place.  The importance of maintaining such an awareness is expressed beautifully in the quote by Annie Dillard that Adrienne used in her March 28 post—“These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.”  Only after forming a new relationship with this body of water did I realize the unique and important dependence I had on my “native” waterway and that such a dependence is not exclusive to a single place.  The James has welcomed me, a stranger, with open arms to all it has to offer, which has proven to be quite a lot.  The secrets it reveals, however, come with patient and diligent interaction, as Carolyn seems to identify in her reflection on the realization of all she and we have learned in a single moment in the woods in “Greenery.”  The integral importance that geography has had on the lessons I’ve learned this and all years past is evident.

It’s for this reason that I’ve come to  anticipate the coming stark change of environment of study abroad as an opportunity to learn and absorb the wholly diverse  lessons of living near a third body of water.  In the fall, I’ll leave both of the formative influence of the Bay and the River behind in pursuit of an entirely new experience with water.  Studying abroad in Rome, Italy will mean acquainting myself for the first time with the Tiber River.  The Tiber or Il Tevere, as it is called in Italy, rises in the Apennine Mountains of Northern Italy and empties 252 miles southwest into the Tyrrhenian Sea.  It’s here that I hope to take the teachings of our Virginian waterways and expand further on them through the medium of a harmonious coexistence with the local environment.

When I return to my childhood home, the smell of the salt air wafting between spindly Loblolly Pines is familiar and welcoming.  Likewise, driving over the Huguenot Bridge for the first time upon a return to Richmond and the empowering view of the Pony Pasture Rapids it reveals is becoming equally as intimate and uplifting.  My time in these places has helped me grow into a more mindful, aware, and appreciative quasi-environmentalist.  Leaving these waters which have had such a profound impact on me is going to be one of the most challenging changes I’ll have made in my life so far, but perhaps when I return home from Rome, I’ll return with new associations to recall an equally significant newfound awareness of and relationship with a new place, a new body of water, and a new part of myself, and perhaps even a more comprehensive understanding of an even greater connectivity than that which I’ve observed this past semester.

As visiting professor and photographer Michael Kolster advised in his lecture about capturing the history and personality of a river through wet plate photography, sometimes when you find a moment deserving of preservation it’s worthwhile to turn 180 degrees on the spot to find that the view in the opposite direction is just as informative.  Looking forward, I see a future adventure on the Roman river full of momentous adaptations and equally momentous personal growth.  Turning to look behind me, I see a past informed and supported by the Virginian waters for which I am eternally grateful.

In our final book club meeting we needed to find a quote that encompassed the entirety of the course and our experiences. To my delight, I found this little but profound quote by Ovid, one of my favorite Roman poets:

“All things change, nothing is extinguished. There is nothing in the whole world, which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.”

The quote ties well into my idea of flow from my previous synthesis blog. I stated that flow is a part of everything from the water cycle to predator-prey interactions. When at Great Falls the Earth Lodgers could not stop the wall of snow that wound through the canyon, nor could we stop the flow of the river. I learned that nature is in constant motion and we were part of the cycles going on around us. Our presence connected us to the land, the sky, and the global cycles beyond any individual’s reach. I also learned to appreciate the snow for even just a few moments because “tempus fugit” or time flies, especially at the end of the semester. Within just twenty minutes the sounds, sights, and thoughts of snow were just a fleeting memory as we left Washington D.C. Thinking about the idea of flow has made me shift focus to a place closer to home at Richmond. The Gambles Mill Trail is a place in motion where there is a smooth flow between seconds, minutes, days, months, and seasons.

I am glad that I got to experience the changing nature of the Gambles Mill Trail and chose this location as my reflection spot. Shannon’s first post “I always fall in love after the rain” about the Gambles Mill Trail adventure helped me choose the trail as my reflection spot. She had an upbeat attitude about the trail as I did and helped me to hone into my special spot.  Over the semester, I really came to appreciate the reflection spot blogs and just how “all things are brought into being with a changing nature.” My patch was where the Little Westham Creek and the relatively nutrient loaded Swale 2 met. Over the course of three visits to my spot, I learned that from just looking from looking from the trail nothing seemed to change. Only that the trees and brush that guarded the entrance to my path were once again green as spring arrived. In reality, my location everything was in constant motion. The songbirds swooped through the branches, vultures scavenged for food, new plants reached for sunlight, and water flowed down the stream. From visit to visit, new signs of life were always a treat and always left me wanting to see what more would change by the time of my next visit. Celeste also seemed to have noticed the changes to her reflection spot in “Itchy Eyes, Beautiful Dogwoods.” She said that the area became pretty as the semester waned. It goes well with the Ovid quote “as the ages glide by in a constant motion” because the spring meant the beginning of new life and the end of a school year. Many “ages” can coincide and have connections through seasons and time.

The ideas of the course such as connection have taken hold in regards to the Gambles Mill trail. All of the water from the residential areas, the University of Richmond, and the Country Club of Virginia is connected to the Gambles Mill Trail. It all flows directly into the Little Westham Creek via the Westhampton Lake spillway or one of the many golf course swales. The waters of the Little Westham Creek will eventually flow into the James River, passing by Pony Pasture Rapids, Belle Isle, and eventually the Chesapeake Bay. My suite’s final project has solidified the idea of the interconnectedness of people and watersheds. There are so many implications of nutrient loading the Little Westham Creek. The fish and the crawfish I found living in the waters from Swale 2 in my second reflection must deal with the nutrient runoff from the area. How were the nutrients affecting them? How many nutrients are entering the James from the creek and the multitude of streams that empty into the James River? Sampling showed that nutrient levels in Swale 2 spiked during rainstorm events and must had some effect on the creatures of the swale. It is funny just how attached someone can get to a spot and the creatures, like the fish within.

The nutrient sampling project on the Gambles Mill Trail also made me think about boundaries and scale. The boundaries of the Little Westham Creek were tiny and insignificant in comparison to the wide expanses of the James River and Chesapeake Bay. In many ways, Mike’s blog “The Ants Go Marching One by One…” reminds us that humans need to act as if they are in a wider society just like ants. He talks about how ants are symbiotes to many other creatures such as plants, caterpillars, and aphids. The ants work together with other species to obtain their goals. Humans have the capacity to live symbiotically with their environment and reduce nutrient pollution in the James River and Chesapeake Bay. It can lead to the reduction of eutrophication events, which can literally suffocate the aquatic life of an area. A healthy overall ecosystem can lead to many rewards for people. For some it would be clean water to play in, may be catch a glimpse of a bald eagle on the James at the Rice Center, or be one day able to sustainably harvest sturgeon caviar just as the settlers of Jamestown did 400 years ago.

Connectivity, boundaries, and scale are very important to the Gambles Mill Trail and in the larger process of the water cycle. People have the ability to live within their environment instead of trying to control it and do as they please. Nothing in the world is permanent as Ovid said. So nutrient pollution and not living within our environment mutually cannot be permanent as well. There will be natural flows of rivers and life cycles regardless of human intervention. Where humans fit into a constantly changing environment is a question that needs to be asked. Stopping excessive nutrient pollution on the Gambles Mill Trail may be just one way to start working and living within our environment.

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.

“Wonder increases with decreasing speed. The less you move, the more you are moved.” These quotes by David Haskell capture the essence of what I have learned in the second half of this semester in Geography of the James River Watershed. Through personal experiences, reading from Haskell’s book and listening to him talk about his experiences in the forests of southeastern Tennessee, and reading a geographer’s perspective on viewing earth from space, I have come to believe that the more we know about where we are, the more we enjoy it and recognize its worth. Having a strong sense of place increases our ability to appreciate what is around us.

I first began to realize how knowledge of a place enhances our enjoyment of our surroundings when I studied for the tree identification portion of our midterm exam. Phoebe was lucky to learn the importance of becoming familiar with different animals species at an early age, as she shared in her blog post “Earth Worms Make America Great”. As a later learner of different species, memorizing the physical characteristics of thirty local trees initially seemed daunting, but it soon became my favorite topic to study. With each tree I learned, I enjoyed walking around campus more. I began to associate personalities with the trees, as I described in my blog post “Spring is Upon Us”. I began taking more walks around campus and the surrounding neighborhoods to see how many trees I could identify that I hadn’t seen before. I was even aware of my new knowledge of trees when driving through northern Virginia on my way to celebrate Easter with my family. Seeing the conical peaks of the Dawn Redwoods poking into the sky and the colorful blossoms of the Redbud and Dogwood gave me great joy. Learning about trees that grow in the area gave me a greater sense of connection with the Richmond and broader Virginia area. Though I have been in Richmond for nearly two years, I still feel like a temporary visitor at times. Spending more time in Richmond and learning more about the history and ecology of the area have helped me root myself here and feel more of a sense of belonging than I otherwise would.

This sense of belonging in and appreciation of my surroundings was reaffirmed when David Haskell visited campus to talk about his new book, The Forest Unseen, and discuss his intensive exploration of a one-meter by one-meter plot of earth in the forest near Sewanee University. Haskell had experienced much of the same sense of appreciation for nature through his observations and getting to know the same plot, or “mandala,” as I had exploring the woods in my own backyard in Richmond. Reading excerpts from Haskell’s book gave me a deepened understanding of what I was experiencing and motivated me to keep learning about my surroundings. Haskell reminded me that one does not have to be an expert biologist (though he is an accomplished one himself) or academic to get the most out of appreciating nature. This is an attitude that I adopted early on in the semester after discussing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in our Earth Lodge literature group, which I mentioned in my first synthesis blog “Discovering the Joys of Nature”. More important than training as a biologist are patience and being observant. These two skills have allowed me to learn much more about my surroundings, particularly at my reflection spot, increasing the satisfaction I experience when I see something familiar or notice a change in something I have been watching over a long time.

An article written by geographer and astronaut Thomas Jones (Jones 2001, 252-261) brought to my attention another dimension through which I can appreciate my surroundings: scale. In the article, Jones recounts his experiences photographing earth from the Space Shuttle Endeavor. After traveling around the world to see what he would be photographing from space in person, Jones had the opportunity to see the world from 215 kilometers away. Recalling memories from his four treks to spaces, Jones said that “the ever-varying beauty of the Earth below never failed to give [him] a new lesson in-and new enthusiasm for –geography.” This article allowed me to better understand how even when one has become deeply familiar with a place, as Haskell did with his mandala and as Jones did with several places around the world, a stronger sense of appreciation can be obtained by observing the place from a different perspective or scale.

My appreciation for place came full-circle recently during our final project preparations. My knowledge of local species grew as our group studied species identification of mammals and plants on the Gambles Mill trail, giving me an even greater sense of awe for what is around me— who knew there were flying squirrels in Richmond! Caroline had a similar experience on a visit to the Gambles Mill trail earlier in the semester, which she shared in her blog “Songs of the Gambles Mill Trail”. During the Gambles Mill trail cleanup organized by Phoebe, Caroline, Shannon, and Celeste, I was able to witness how other members of the community appreciate their space and experience connectivity on the trail through the community garden and using the trail for recreation. I was pleased to realize that when the species identification sign created by our group is installed, we will be helping others to gain a greater appreciation for place by adding to their knowledge of plants and animals that live in the area. I hope others will gain as much as I have from learning more about my environment.

I have heard statistics that within weeks of taking final exams, students lose the vast majority of the knowledge they obtained in a class. While this may be true for traditional classes, I am sure it will not be the case for my experience with Geography of the James River Watershed. This is because I not only learned about the James River Watershed, but I also learned about new ways of thinking and new lenses through which to view the world. This caused me to experience several transformations in my perspectives. After this semester is over, I may not remember how to determine whether an infinite sequence of numbers diverges or how to find the Fourier series of a function using calculus, but knowing the connection between a strong sense of place and appreciation for the environment is something that is sure to stick with me for years to come.

Jones, T.D. 2001. A Globe That Fills the Sky: Geography from the Space Shuttle in Geographical Review. 91: 252-261.