Elm leaves

This morning I swept leaves -

Jaunty lemon-buff elm leaves

Spread across the deck, like a tailor’s pattern

For tiny asymmetrical flat caps, a pattern

That will be assembled in green

And doffed skywards next spring.

Oct 2011

Hope, resilience, sustainablity

Written at the Black Earth Institute Annual Meeting.

I can still recall the particular geometry the body needed to adopt to climb the trees in the neighborhood where I grew up.  Those trees where one could be a simple straight line and inch along a tree bole set at an acute angle to the ground, those trees where one needed to make of one legs a geometer's divider to reach from branch to branch.  I recall those which could only be climbed by swiveling around the trunk, winding up the tree like a little human orange rind being sloughed off the fruit.  I recall too the mounting terror as I got higher and higher.  I was no John Muir atop a Douglas spruce in a Sierras' storm - I was a frightened boy who would get stuck precisely half way up a tree afraid to go further.  Afraid to go down.  And so I would stay aloft for longer than was sane, waiting for the fear to pass, waiting for that trust and hope that propelled me up the tree to return to guide me back down.

Boy, and tree, and wind, and sky; fear and trust and hope, are all world.  A tree is not theory to the climber. The limbs of tree and boy's limbs are world inseparable.  But the fear and trust and hope are also world - moods that are perhaps distinctively human; but because boy and tree are world the boys fear and hope and trust are also world.  I am fearful of world but I must accept that; I trust what it is to be human and accept that; I am hopeful and accept that.  I will climb up; I will pause in the mood of the world; and when I must I will climb down.

A Fragment on the Meanings of the Term Restoration

The meanings that adhere to the term “restore” and “restoration” can be classified into a) those that relate to the projected outcomes and purpose of the restorative act for a generic ‘thing” [which may or may not be a human being]; b) those that specifically address a specified human element in relation to an outcome or a process.  The latter definitions can further be divided into those that related to humans conferring or humans receiving a benefit. 

 

Definitions closest to projected outcomes for a “thing” include: “to build up again; to re-erect or reconstruct.” (Meaning 3 in OED), “[t]o bring back to the original state; to improve, repair, or retouch (a thing) so as to bring it back to its original condition.” (Meaning 3b OED).  A rarer uses of the word “restore” is “[t]o set right, repair”.  All of these uses seem to conform pretty readily to the technical definitions developed by conservation practitioners. Further removed from the senses that the ecological restorationist ordinarily use is “[t]o reproduce or represent (something ancient, an extinct animal, etc.) in its original form.”  We should note that this last definition describes the circumstances of several restoration projects where the original “natural” systems has been replaced by a human dominated one [say an agricultural system] and is then made available as open land for conservation purposes.  The definition seems also to describe circumstances criticized by some that restoration claims produces fakes, forgeries (Katz; Elliott). 

A Pedestrian Fragment on Interstitial Ecology

It’s just the way we roll: on our walk today Vassia and I detoured from our habitual walking route and instead of going east towards the lake and then north along the lakeside trail, we went east and south towards Chicago.  No particular reason; sometimes strollers, flâneurs, a pair of peripatetics such as we are, are just called upon to delicately subvert the normal course of things.  Who does the calling?  To whose invitation do we respond? 

We do most of our living in the margins.  Between our workaday world and the wilderness of sleep, a few hours of respite, between the orderly abodes of our little city and the wilderness of the lake, a margin of grass and sand; between the end of one week and resumption of our same old travail, a couple of days to be very mildly wild, and by wild I include the exercise of our animal limbs: we walk. 

We walked along the beach where we could, or marched along the path by the beach and looked out over the grey-green water.  The waves were high and surgent and crashed against the wooden posts driven into the sand.  Groins, I think they call these; wooden groins driven in the sand to calm the lake.  In the crack in our town between the houses and apartments and the lake, are trees and grass and weeds.  In the cracks in the pavements, small weeds grow, no less lovely for being common as the rind of muck they grow in.

On our return we walked across the graveyard.  The dead have no plans.  Between those monuments to the plan-less, geese shat and walked, and honked.

Triptych

For Mary C Nolan

Stooping in to light the fire

With thrilling agonies of shallow breathes,

The gas ignites and chases the

Maledictions from the grumbling house.

Mother Mary, I and

Fire dissolve in this chromatic pause –

Before: a holy land proclaimed

And Pharaoh’s whispers from the past.

The paint is seeping from the scene

The gilded canvas vaguely holds

A simple image from that life –

The smell and sound are narrative.

The Ecology of Knowledge: Ecological Resilience and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

As students of science we have all, no doubt, absorbed the lessons from the history of our disciplines that changes in thinking tend not to be meted out incrementally. The Darwinian and Wallacean account of evolutionary change through natural selection did not merely supplement alternative, often supernatural, accounts of organic change through time. The idea was a revolutionary one – it turned the orthodoxies of the time on their heads and did so tumultuously and irrevocably (at least for those 40% or so of us who seem to accept evolutionary accounts). A revolution is rapid, and in the revolutionary moment one set of conceptual structures is replaced with another. After the revolution, the new structures may persist for a time – a period of “normal science” – even though, almost invariably, the data accumulated through the lens of new theories may not always be fully supportive of those newly ascendant theories. And as those cracks begin to show the Darwins and Wallaces of the world set to work and a whiff of revolution is in the air again

Familiar stuff all of this, I’m sure. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science, coined the term “paradigm” for those "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers" and professors have employed that term tirelessly when words like “model” or “pattern” or “program” just seem too darned plain. In contrast with the “mop-up” work that is the business of “normal science” operating within a given scientific paradigm (and who wouldn’t get excited about mop-up jobs) Kuhn identified the manner in which rapid change in science is compressed into its major revolutionary events.

For now my interest is not merely in the ways in which Kuhnian analysis can be applied to ecology. Rather, I am curious about how Kuhn’s model of paradigms and revolutions not only assists in developing our explicit expectations of what revolutionary ecology makes possible, but also in how ecological thought can double back and influence the way in which we might think about the history of science in general. The revolution I have especially in mind, as I will elaborate below, is that associated with a resurgence of interest in ecological dynamics: ideas about the structure, function of ecological systems and the way these systems respond to disturbance. Ecologists are developing these conceptions at a level of generality that makes their models epistemologically relevant to phenomena as diverse as lakes, financial markets, and the history of science itself. So a paradigmatic shift relating to theories of change in ecology allows ecology to reflect on the nature of all paradigmatic shifts including its own ones. In this sense there is an ecology of knowledge, and ecologists therefore can benefit from collaboration with, and insight from, non-traditional partners in the humanities, in particular, with those that reflect on stability and change in systems not typically of interest to ecologists.  Kuhn is just one such anomalous partner.  In return, ecology may return the favor by exporting insights gleaned from the study of nature, making them available for the behavior of other complex systems. 

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