When I teach literature, I am always impressed by how cut and dried the ‘idea’ of setting was compared to how complex setting plays out in the good ol’ day-to-day. That’s why I was so glad to see KQED’s quest this week on #CLMOOC was to help us question and explore the meaning of public space.
When I introduce the idea of setting to my literature students I want them to be very local. In fact, I wanted them to think of setting in terms of their spaces, their homes, their neighborhoods. I wanted to get them to become aware of where they lived as if they were characters in their own work of fiction.
In the process of doing this I discovered a marvelous tool for coming to terms with setting and place: The Big Here. This is a quiz created…well, let Kevin Kelly tell the story from here:
You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. (See the world eco-region map ). At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.
The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire. Variations of this list have appeared over the years with additions by Jim Dodge, Peter Berg, and Stephanie Mills among others.
It is quite glorious how this ties together so many threads in our collective work this summer–systems, games, remediation, identity, and now–public space. I have come back to this quiz/questionnaire over and over in my own. Maybe you would like to explore it, too. I invite you below or you can be terribly informal and just skim the website and lurk a bit there. It repays deeply and irrevocably.
Here is a Public Commons if you want to share:
I am hoping to add a Google Survey as well so that folks can gather their responses in a public spreadsheet, a more democratic space I cannot imagine. If somebody beats me to this I would not be unhappy (hint/hint/hint).
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The Big Here? Am going There.
Kevin
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I think a lot about watersheds. (I didn’t before I lived where I live now.)
We live in a valley between two mountain ranges. It’s high desert, and we are luck to have several large oak trees on our land. (Large trees like this are uncommon in the “flats.”)
Two years ago, there was a big fire here. (Big like thousands of acres, 8 weeks, hundreds of firefighters.)
After that, there were floods. Also big.
I was casually reading email one day when I saw a flood warning that cited my road. (Bear in mind, I live on a very small dirt road that wasn’t even on Google Maps at the time. So that was pretty weird.)
I did more investigation and found that the reason we have trees is that we also have an old creek bed from the canyon in the mountains behind us. Many years ago, that drainage was diverted. Now the floods were so bad, they expected the water to go back to its old course — our land, essentially.
We were lucky — it didn’t flood catastrophically. But over the two years since, there have been a lot of crazy bureaucrat meetings to discuss where the water “should” go, where people want it to go, and a lot of other nonsense.
So, yeah, watersheds matter.
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Having a sense of place…it is the one piece I find increasingly missing in my students lives, a sense of being from somewhere–not everywhere, but from some single ‘where’. I have been reading about the tragedy of the Central Valley, but I cannot help but think it is the tragicomic legacy of petro agribusiness driving out local knowledge with cheap energy. Not only driving wisdom from the land but driving the land itself into perdition. I am not exaggerating. The loss of topsoil, groundwater, and folk is a direct result of the hubris that comes when we think we have any clear idea of where the water should go. We are on a knife’s edge and most folks have no idea that we are all teetering in the balance. I hope for a slow crash, but you can’t rebuild tacit knowledge overnight. We can only rely on each other wherever we happen to be when the black swan descends. Local reliance and knowledge will rule the day. Unless it is a hard crash, then the preppers may have already won.
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This is a key step in practicing using what I call “the anthropologist’s eye:” look around, wherever you are, and disappear all the things that people have put there, imagine yourself one of the animals who’ve just gotten here, wherever that is, and the first thing you need to know is, where’s the water? and if it’s not obvious, where could it come from?
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This was a major thread of concern in the “back to the land” movement of which I was a part starting in 1968. Peter Berg, editor of “Reinhabiting a Separate Country” and inspiration for the Reinhabitory Institute http://www.reinhabitory-institute.org/ lived at Black Bear for several years.
Among the most important books for us at that point was Carl Sauer’s “Agricultural Origins and Dispersals,” https://archive.org/details/agriculturalorig033518mbp which lent a planetary perspective to what we were doing.
This thread also reminds me of a post I wrote last year for Cowbird
http://cowbird.com/story/97289/Markings_On_Her_Face/