One Thousand Urban Miles - Take The Praeger Walking Challenge

In 1902 Robert Lloyd Praeger, the prolific Irish naturalist, recorded a new occurrence of the rare grass Milium effusum (wood millet) in Dublin. He discovered it in Bushy Park, which was adjacent to his home on Zion Road in Rathgar, a few miles south of the city center. This was the park where more than seventy years later I played as a child, being a five-minute walk from my childhood home. It is the park that I visit every time I return to Dublin.

In Ireland, Praeger is associated with the botanical investigation of that country’s wildest places. Less attention has been paid to Praeger as a proto-urban ecologist: a naturalist who spent most of his life in the city, who wrote extensively about his garden, and who devoted a chapter of his most renowned book, The Way That I Went, An Irishman in Ireland (1937), to Dublin and its environs. He wrote there on the famous wagtail roosts in O’Connell Street, the ferns on Dublin walls, and the plants on North Bull Island, a coastal conservation area in Dublin bay. He and a small team also surveyed and wrote extensively on Lambay Island a couple of miles off the coast, north of the city.

In addition to his urban interests, what appeals to me about Praeger is that though in many ways he was a fairly traditional natural historian whose extensive writings—in all there were 800 papers and twenty-four books—detail the distribution of plants in Ireland, he nonetheless wrote reflectively and lyrically about botanical field work as a pleasure for its own sake. Praeger raised walking to the level of exultation and methodology, and not conveyance merely. After all, his most famous book is The Way That I Went—not Where I Went and What I Found There.

I have been working on a lengthy essay on Praeger in recent months, having spent a week last February rummaging through his archives in the Royal Irish Academy, in Dublin. During this time, the idea occurred to me that not only is there a Praegerian product (all those papers and books) but there is also a Praegerian spirit: a spirit of openness to the world, a type of attentiveness that Praeger insists one can cultivate only on foot. Working on this material, I decided that I would, as a type of sympathetic exercise, embrace Praeger’s peripatetic inclination, but employ it in a strictly urban direction, bringing together two parts of Praeger’s work and interests. I am proposing therefore, over each of the next five years, to walk 1000 miles in the city. I invite you to join me by planning a thousand-mile walk of your own in the city or town in which you live. Before you commit, let me give you a little more information on the great man himself and the significance of the 1000-mile annual walk.

Read on at City Creatures here

A hero in the matter of walking

Robert Lloyd Praeger, the celebrated Irish naturalist, had a hero in the matter of walking. This was the naturalist and literary scholar Henry Chichester Hart (1847–1908). From May 1875 till October 1876 Hart served as naturalist on HMS Discovery on an expedition to the North Pole, though they returned without having made it to the North Pole. At home in Ireland Hart was know for his vigorous walking.  In 1889 on a wager of £50 from Richard Manliffe Barrington (1849–1915), he walked about seventy-five miles from Dublin to the summit of Lugnaquilla, the highest mountain in Co. Wicklow, and back again in a single 24 hour period. Praeger recorded another episode, one that remains celebrated in Irish naturalists’ circles. Hart met one day with Barrington, for a day’s botanizing near the Powerscourt Waterfall in Wicklow.  The day was wet, of course, and both naturalists were soon soaked to the skin, and yet both men walked in silence. Hart took to walking through the briars and long grasses to discourage Barrington.  In response Barrington walked into the river, sat down, and commenced to eat his lunch.  Wordlessly, Hart did the same and both sat until they were drenched.   Barrington is usually described as having being delicate, at least as a child.  I heard this story first from David Bellamy, the botanist, when he visited Dublin in the 1980s.

Ireland 2012 in preparation for Ireland 2013

Many of the posts for the coming weeks will be about the National Parks and environs of Killarney, Connemara, and Wicklow.  I will travelling there in preparation for a study abroad trip scheduled there for DePaul students.  The program is co-directed by me and Randall Honold, a colleague at DePaul.  Randall's training is in philosophy, mine is in ecology: what could possibly go wrong. For more information on the trip see here.

I will be rereading and commenting on Robert Lloyd Praeger’s book The Way That I Went as I go.  Another book that will travel the circuit with me is Tim Robinson’s Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Penguin Ireland, 2011), the third in his trilogy of Connemara books.  

The way that we will go - following R L Praeger in the Irish National Parks

What follows is a crude draft of a planned trip to Ireland with our students in June 2013...suggestions etc welcome...nothing is set in stone but generally this is what we'll be doing....

“The way that I went,” wrote Robert Lloyd Praeger in 1937 “was an Irish way, with extraorbital aberrations, especially in later years, to the extent of a thousand or fifteen hundred miles.  It was from the beginning a way of flowers and stones and beasts.”  Seventy-five years after the publication of his classic account of Irish natural history we are proposing to follow after Praeger in a study abroad trip to Ireland’s wildest places.

 

We will follow Praeger to four distinct regions: the Wicklow Highlands, Connemara, the Burren, and the Kerry Highlands.  Each area is ecologically distinct exemplifying a particular aspect of Ireland’s natural legacy, and each is the location of a National Park which form the focal points of the study-abroad trip.  In addition to their unique natural history, the three regions are also culturally distinct, presenting opportunities for students to appreciate both the history and the contemporary situation of Ireland. 

The overarching theme for our study will be an examination of the Irish landscape as a co-production of nature and culture.  Drawing upon the long tradition of Irish archaeology, landscape interpretation, and historical botany in which Ireland’s ecosystems have been investigated in order to understand both the ecological and human-historical factors that shaped them, we will create case studies assessing issues pertinent to each location we visit.  The theme of co-production is, in turn, relevant, for an assessment of environmental issues elsewhere in the world: how does one think ecologically about cultural landscapes, and how does one manage a relationship with environments which have historically been influenced by cultural factors?  Ireland has not been a wilderness in the sense used in the writings of the American tradition for almost 10,000 years.  As ecologists increasingly appreciate that we live on a humanized globe, well characterized case studies of ecologically valuable cultural landscapes, such as are found in the Irish National Parks, will be helpful in developing sustainability models.  That being said, many problems beset Irish landscapes: tensions stemming from very recent economic development as well as from the range of ecological pressures arising from global change: modified climates, invasive species, atmospheric pollution, and so forth.  We shall comprehensively analyze and learn from these.  Students will be explicitly invited to apply what they learn in Ireland to the situation in the American Midwest.