Another way to put this is that in your final project you too will be enacting an ecological perspective. Or, that is something I want you to consider and develop. Here is a way to think about that. There is a heuristic (in classical rhetoric: a model or structure to generate or organize thinking for an essay, argument, project, a device for invention) known as the particle/wave/field heuristic. I summarize it below by way of the rhetoric book Form and Surprise in Composition: Writing and Thinking Across the Curriculum by John Bean and John Ramage [they take the heuristic from the Young, Becker and Pike's Rhetoric: Discovery and Change]. They suggest it as a method that helps develop an argument on a given topic by enabling the writer to switch perspective systematically. You can use this for any topic, though you will notice that it seems particularly apt for writing about topics related to environment and ecology.

First, take your topic X and view it as a static, unchanging entity (particle): note its distinguishing features, characteristics; consider how this entity differs from other similar things. For example: Thoreau on walking or the wild. Or Horton’s definitions of ‘what is natural, what is right.’ Think of this as specific ideas and statements made; specific quotations.

Second, view the same topic as a dynamic changing process (wave): note how it acts and changes through time, grows, develops, decays. How does Horton’s definitions change as he explores various parts of the Chesapeake ? Do we see the same vision in the end as at the beginning? What are some changes you observe? Think of this as places where you find echoes and contradictions and traces of the ideas or earlier statements. And of course, you need not rely just on Horton for this: consider your own vision/definition of some aspect of the Chesapeake–how has it changed during the semester?

Third, view the topic as a Field, as related to things around it and part of a system, network or ecological environment. What depends on X? What does X depend on? What would happen if X doesn’t exist? Who loves (hates) X? What communities (categories) does X belong to?  Who would love this idea? Who would hate it? What is X’s function in a larger system. Think about Berry’s view of solutions that focus on pattern. In a sense, this field view is the point of the entire Chesapeake Semester–and thus is a view that the final project should work towards.

As you can see from the questions asked from the “field” perspective, you are already moving toward some crucial ideas for how we have been thinking during the Chesapeake Semester: to bend a famous phrase from Aldo Leopold, thinking like the bay. My contention is that all good writing is ecological in this sense to the extent that a compelling and meaningful argument/essay/thesis (call it what you will) needs to move dynamically between focus on particulars and some sense and awareness of a larger field that informs the perspective, even when it can’t be always in view. A good argument is aware of what it is not focusing on–and needs to incorporate that into its perspective.

As Thoreau puts it: a truer discipline for a writer is to take two views of the same. Or as Berry suggests, a good argument (identifying a problem and attempting a solution) is ecologically minded when it solves for pattern.

Some further suggestions for developing your final project:

• Stop by to visit one or more of the professors from the Chesapeake Semester, to follow up with them on ideas from your project that relate to their field. This is one way to work on the reflection component, where we expect you to integrate ideas from each section of the Semester.
• Workshop a draft of your project: you can send me something or stop by to talk with me about a draft; you can visit the Writing Center—would recommend you do that at least once, to get some help with revision or editing.

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Wendell Berry is a poet, novelist and one of the leading voices (particularly in his essays) in American nature writing today. He is also a farmer (from Kentucky); his vision combines thinking about the poetics and humanities of nature from the perspective of being what he calls a “marginal” farmer. We see the autobiographical roots of his environmental vision in his essay “The Making of a Marginal Farm.” Recall, as well, that Berry is mentioned in Wennersten’s environmental history of the Chesapeake Bay (p. 220-221: his vision of land stewardship is compared to the legacy of John Beale Bordley from the Chesapeake in the 1780s). So, what from Berry can we apply to the Chesapeake Semester?

Some notes from the “Marginal Farm” essay that strike me as particularly relevant and provocative.

• I note the way Berry combines in his environmental critical vision elements of the following mix of the natural and cultural: ecology and natural science, anthropology, religion, ethics, writing, work
• “And so our reclamation project has been, for me, less a matter of idealism or morality than a kind of self-preservation. A destructive history, once it is understood as such, is a nearly insupportable burden. Understanding it is a disease, depleting the sense of efficacy and paralyzing effort, unless it finds healing work. For me that work has been partly of the mind, in what I have written, but that seems to have depended inescapably on work of the body and of the ground. In order order to affirm the values most native and necessary to me–indeed, to affirm my own life as a thing decent in possibility–I needed to know in my own experience that this place did not have to be abused in the past, and that it can be kindly and conservingly used now.”
• His idea of coming to live in his subject, live in the place he wrote about: “One’s relation to one’s subject ceases to be merely emotional or esthetical, or even merely critical, and becomes problematical, practical, and responsible as well. Because it must. It is like marrying your sweetheart.”
• Notice his definition of the knowledge it takes to conserve the land–with echoes of Leopold: “land like ours… can be conserved in use only by competent knowledge, by a great deal more work than is required by leveler land, by a devotion more particular and disciplined than patriotism, and by ceaseless watchfulness and care. All there are cultural values and resources, never sufficiently abundant in this country, and now almost obliterated by the contrary values of the so-called ‘affluent society.’”

The essay “Solving for Pattern” provides useful–indeed, insightful–terms for comparison as you explore farming issues in the Chesapeake. Consider, as you journey in our neighborhood, whether the farms you see are solving for problem or solving for pattern.  But I am interested in the ways that Berry’s insights suggest issues that extend out to the whole of the semester and could matter in your final project. In what ways is the “problem” of the Chesapeake a problem in need of pattern? In your own approach to the problem, whatever it may be, how do you (as writer, scientist, sociologist, student) need to consider pattern? Pattern, in many ways, is about a systems perspective; as a poet-farmer, Berry gives us some ways to think about with an eye to interdisciplinary and humanistic study. We could also note his use of the word “ramifying” with its organic implications of solutions (and problems) that branch out in complexity.

In other words–Berry gives us a way to think about being more organic in our reading and studies.  As a useful thought experiment,  we could take Wendell Berry’s listing of 14 characteristics of a “good” or “organic” solution in “Solving for Pattern” and for farm substitute text–and ask: what makes for an organic reading or interpretation? This is something environmental writers have long been interested in–as we see starting with Thoreau: how to have a text that is itself natural, that represents nature in it as naturally, organically as possible; how to transplant words to his page, as he puts it in “Walking.” Thus, for example:

1. A good [reading, interpretation] accepts given limits, using so far as possible what is at hand.
2. A good reading accepts also the limitation of discipline.
3. A good reading improves the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern–it is a qualitative solution–rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.
4. A good reading solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems. I am talking about health as opposed to almost any cure, coherence of pattern as opposed to almost any solution produced piecemeal or in isolation…

Is it strange to substitute solution with reading, farm with text (or variants: imagination, writing, poetry, narrative)? At the same time that he is talking clearly about organic farming, can we really suggest a connection or relation to reading, a link between agricultural and cultural production? Yes–because Berry does precisely this in the same essay. He argues that the view of pattern is a view toward the health of a living system of relations: “the structures of organ, organism, and ecosystem…belong to a series of analogical integrities.” The final point in the essay gives us to understand that “analogy” is both a scientific and a poetic concept–it is how nature works, but also (since we can’t separate this completely) how humans see and interact with nature. Thus any solution we might call “organic” is not natural itself. “We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy.”  As Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, and emphasize in his thinking about nature, man is an analogist, following the analogical patterns of nature. For example, notice how Emerson thus blends science with poetry in this passage from his essay “Poetry and Imagination”:

There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of light and of heat trans-late each other; – so do the laws of sound and of color ; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he observes that all things in nature, the animals, the mountain, the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, – have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his life ; their growths, decays, quality, and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are framed by their help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him, sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in caricature, a copy of every humor and shade in his character and mind. The world is an immense picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is the mask of a man….

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolated it, – which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet gives us the eminent experiences only, – a god stepping from, peak to peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain.

Emerson’s vision of occult relation from Nature (transparent eyeball) is reinforced–though, to my mind, shown to be much more down to earth, material, not merely Romantic vision. Not far from Berry’s practical vision of farming. Though Berry may not use Emerson’s imagery, or the particular language of science needing to be poetic (and elsewhere in this essay, Emerson claims that poetry is a science), and being a problem when it is unpoetical, both share the vision of analogy, of system and relation. As Berry reminds us, both (the science and the poetry) are organic artifacts, parts of larger patterns in which we live as humans in nature. Science and poetry offer poor solutions and unnatural readings, when pattern is forgotten.

So, one of our challenges in pursing a humanistic perspective in environmental study is to consider how to read and think and write for pattern. How to read, write, and think in  in a college like Berry’s poet-farmer. How to be or become (or Berry and Emerson might suggest, return to being) more organic in our readings.

Related articles

• Leopold: The Land Ethic (chesapeakepilgrim.wordpress.com)
• Emerson: Nature and natural philosophy (luminousallusion.wordpress.com)
• The Land Ethic: summary of different approaches to ethics in relation to land and nature

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Leopold: Loving the Land

Some notes on his Land Ethic (e-text linked here).

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Wendell Berry’s ideas the love and culture and beauty matter in an ethical (and not just scientific) understanding of nature are connected to Aldo Leopold, a prominent figure in early 20th century environmental writing.

Overall questions:

Can writing (or broadly the arts/works of the imagination) be viewed as biotic or ecological? How—from Leopold’s perspective? From yours?

And reverse question: Can the biotic community or an ecosystem or land be viewed in terms of art, aesthetics, writing, imagination? Do they share principles (call them ‘ethics’) with the arts and writing?

It seems to me Leopold argues yes to the second: that the biotic must be viewed in part in terms of aesthetics/culture, if we are to think of it properly. And that the first question is yes—and that his writing demonstrates this in points—and later writers such as Wendell Berry take this up more directly: only culture can save nature.

For context: such relations between the sciences and the arts/poetry/philosophy not common in our split of ‘two cultures,’ but is so of 19^th c natural philosophy, such as with Thoreau. So, Leopold in part critical of an academic science that needs to remember some lessons from its past, where ethics and aesthetics were part of its focus.

Land Ethic

• Compares/analogizes ecology with philosophy/ethics—suggests that the extension of ethics to ecology/land is actually an ecological evolution (238)
  • Why connect/compare ecology (biotic) with philosophy/humanities—and ultimately, aesthetics, the ethics of art? Key for Leopold is community—and the implication is that the community concept (individual is member of community of interdependent parts) needs to be understood by more than science and biology or ecology. In fact, that it needs to be understood in part through what he refers to as intellect and love and aesthetics. (246)
    • Also in Foreword (xix): an ‘esthetic’ and ‘cultural harvest’ we can/need to reap from the land, but has been forgotten (and lost by the Abrahamicview of land as commodity)
      • So, community as a term for beauty, culture, intellect, spirit—in contrast with ‘commodity’: why and how?
      • Think communion? Communication?
• So what are some lessons in “community” and “interdependence” and love/feeling can we learn from the aesthetic experience?
  • In what ways can an experience with a writer (novel or poem or argument) or artist (painting, film, photograph) be compared to ecology or to a biotic community? What makes it “ecological”?
    • Think of the energy circuit he discusses: can this be connected to reading, writing, or viewing art?
  • Read as example: Marshland Elegy.
  • • Lesson from Berry: solving for pattern—similar issues in patterns, symbolic representation of any sort built on patterns (from basic level of language to sophisticated level of design)
    • Chris Jordan?
  • To reverse this, then: what are some “ethics” or principles or characteristics of the aesthetic experience that Leopold feels are missing from conservation and the “environmental studies” of his day? Can we identify any of these ethics in Leopold’s writing? Are there other writers/artists we might find these ethics evident? What are examples of Leopold’s communication/communion/community in his writing?
    • His use of literary references: odyssey, homer; allusion

One writer to compare: Wendell Berry (preserving wildness; his vision of the loving economy [523]—and indivisibility of natural and cultural

[perhaps the key reason why for Leopold the ecological perspective must be aesthetic/ethical, humanistic—because as Berry suggests, only the cultural/human can save the natural (since only the cultural can destroy it).

It is a different way of looking at things, a scarcely plumbed literature awaiting only skillful enough translation and properly attuned ears, to which these essays may contribute a bit.

That sounds quite a bit like John Burroughs in “The Art of Seeing Things”: we need to read the fine print of the book of nature–it is there but for the seeing and listening. And Thoreau would add to that, all we need is more sauntering, more deliberate reading and wandering. I would say that Horton is very much in this tradition. Bay Country is a late 20th-century version of a saunter around the Chesapeake by an amateur naturalist and, more to our point, deliberate reader and writer.

But recall that we also began to discuss in our first class the ways that Burroughs’s vision of “seeing things” and reading the “book of nature” also implies some limit to full comprehension. There is, in the end, mystery to which we need to be initiated–but thus a mystery that may never be resolved. Thoreau broaches this as well at the end of “Walking” when he turns to his own familiar fields and the recognition that even they must remain ultimately unfamiliar, for they will “leave no trace.” The book of nature can be read, but we can never stop reading or interpreting it.

I would suggest from the ecological perspective, this implication of the limits of full comprehension (ever finishing the book) has much to do with system. Horton signals this systems perspective early in the first chapter when he argues: “You must look at all the parts, and their relations to all the other parts. Only then can you begin to judge what is natural.” Put differently, the problem with full comprehension arises when we think we have the whole, we forget about relations to all the other parts. We think we have the book done, forgetting that it is part of a larger series of texts.

From the literary perspective, that is, from our perspective of reading and writing the environment, this implication of unfinished and never-ending reading can be given the term irony. That, in fact, is a word Horton uses frequently in Bay Country. It is a familiar term–and so you probably know what he means when he writes:

It is the massive proliferation of corn-growing since World War II that has led to the abundance of wild geese. Ironically, our expanded grain agriculture resulted in a huge increase in fertilizer, washed by rains into the bay in such unremitting quantities that it has killed the submerged grass beds…[3]

It would be ironic: even as we advance toward understanding the workings of the natural world, other facets of our advance already have so intruded as to become the dominant factor in those workings; we peer, expectantly, into the secrets of the bay’s behavior, and see only ourselves. [62]

This last reference brings us back to mystery–and brings us closer, I think, to understanding what “irony” means in relation to the environment. In my view, there are two types of irony, good and bad, or irony that we try to be aware of and recognize its potential and irony that we completely neglect. Irony generally refers to the potential in our use of language to say one thing and mean something different at the same time. It can generally be thought of as a contradiction–but a contradiction in which the apparent discord or disjunction, the oppositions, turn out to have some relationship. For more on my thoughts on irony, inspired by Thoreau (from my concurrent Environmental Writing class), read on here. Good irony is when we recognize that we can’t see the whole system from any one point, that parts are related to other parts. And therefore, we understand (even if we can’t fully comprehend) that we are always, in part, looking at our own relation to the system, and our own influence on that system. Bad irony is when we forget that we are part of a larger system of relations, that our very perceptions are part of the system and potentially part of the problem as much as the solution. Wendell Berry writes of this as the difference between solving for pattern and solving for problem (we will get to this later in the semester).

What’s the point in this? Even though it sounds strange to focus this much on the literary concept of irony, I think it helps us understand how this writer, Tom Horton, or a writer like Thoreau or Annie Dillard, approach ecological thinking from a writerly perspective. The key is context, as Horton writes later in the opening chapter “What is Natural, What is Right”:

‘The hawk, the swoop and the hare–all are one,’ wrote the poet Gary Snyder, in as terse and true an ecological statement as I ever read. The awesome thrill of the swoop, the panic of the cowering prey, beauty and cruel death–each is integral to the very existence of the raptor, and there is not much gain in discussing any part out of context.

So, as you complete your first journey, I wonder what you think now of a larger context for seeing and understanding the Bay–knowing that there is still more context to come. At Jamestown and elsewhere, have you encountered irony? Is there good irony out there, people and places where the “full context” is insisted upon and ever present? Is there bad irony, encounters where you find parts discussed out of context–people looking into the Bay and seeing only themselves? And finally, in preparation for our next class, I wonder how you would assess Horton’s “absolutes,” the definitions of what is natural that he offers in the chapter: curves are natural; changelessness; wildness. Have you encountered these absolutes as you have explored the senses of place around the Chesapeake? Or, might you argue that limiting a definition of the natural and the right to only three absolutes is, in a word, ironic?

This article gives an example of how a writer envisions nature–but in the process, offers ways of thinking about how we might approach what Burroughs’s calls the “fine print” in the book of nature. Thus, as you begin your explorations of the Chesapeake, consider how each of the points I note below might be applied to the Chesapeake Semester. Consider, overall, ways that your studies this semester is also an act, or an art, of “initiation.”

1. To love is the other half (147). Note Burroughs’s initial focus on love. To love is the necessary “other half” of knowing. With this Burroughs suggests that the scientific understanding of nature (science, knowing) needs to be combined with an artistic and “poetic temperament.”  This is a point embodied in Thoreau–and we see it in Dillard. All are, in the root sense of the word, amateur scientists and naturalists. And so the writer of nature must read nature as a book that demands both observation and imagination.
2. To find what you are not looking for (149). Echoes with Thoreau (two views of the same) and with Dillard: her interest in seeing, in being restored to sight. Is it too much of a stretch to think of this as early versions of systems thinking? We could throw Emerson into the mix, Emerson whose famous passage in Nature (1836) is about imagining a different way of seeing:
   1. To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
3. The focus on senses: seeing hearing, touching. The many senses of senses.
4. Taking note–and taking notes–from the book of nature: to be read slowly…the reader/writer as ‘saunterer.’
5. We must be initiated. Studying nature, writing and reading the environment as an art, but also something deeper, perhaps spiritual. Writers where this sense comes up, in various ways as we will see: Thoreau, Dillard, Muir (who famously wrote the we need wilderness parks as places to play and pray in), Abrams, Berry.

_____________

Some field notes from Thoreau’s “Walking”

The play on senses: [13] When we walk we naturally go to the fields and woods; what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves since they did not go to the woods, “They planted groves and walks of Platans” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticoes open to the air. Of course, it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations, and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is; I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works — for this may sometimes happen.

The focus on language, etymology, roots (your first writing project): [18] The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs; a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro (13) derives from veho to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence too apparently the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are way-worn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.

A nonlinear (non-Euclidean) view of nature/a non-European view of civilization: 2.2  The outline which would bound my walks, would  be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits, which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the south-west or west. Eastward I go only by force; butwestward I go free

[35] I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me, of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age — which no culture, in short, can give.

The problem of culture/cultivation–the interest in decay. 3.[8] I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have very acre of earth cultivated; part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

Thoreau’s version of ‘leave no trace’–a problem then for writing nature? 3. [17] For my part, I feel, that with regard to Nature, I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.(8) Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will o’ the wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The Walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town, sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, As it were in some far away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

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Thoreau uses that idea in his essay “Walking,” suggesting that the very word “saunter” (which he urges we do as an act of wildness) comes from the French, from pilgrims walking their way to the holy land.

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre” — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a sainte-terrer“, a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit (1) in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.”

It is implicit in John Burroughs essay on seeing and walking, “The Art of Seeing Things” (as we will see shortly). And it is there in Horton’s Bay Country. Notice his preface: setting up a book of essays seemingly about  mundane and familiar things of the Chesapeake watershed–the fish, trees, birds, water, assorted natural objects–those, he tells us, are only starting points. A rockfish is not just a fish. His real focus is on a fuller context in which we are “connected” to rockfish in “extraordinary webs of place and emotion and responsibility”:

And all that is just what is attached to one fish. We bay dwellers move in a far richer and more extensive matrix of subtle relations and ancient connections with nature than we can yet explain or admit… Thus we need our religions, our cosmologies, and equally, I think, a greatly expanded appreciation of all the ways in which we and nature fit together. (xiii)

Horton thinks of this expanded perspective as an appreciation of enchantment and beauty: a rediscovery of the familiar in the unfamiliar, attentiveness to the neglected science of “the physics of beauty.”  One word he uses to mark this: ensorcelled.   [10 points to anyone who uses ensorcell in a sentence; 20 points if you use it with Horton].

And then notice how he closes this preface, in words that very much (again, as you will soon see) bring John Burroughs to mind (these essays, you will note, were awarded the Burroughs medal):

Wonder lies in the bay and its watershed in full measure. It is nothing alien or mystical or reserved for the expert. It is a different way of looking at things, a scarcely plumbed literature awaiting only skillful enough translation and properly attuned ears, to which these essays may contribute a bit.

Thus Horton, setting up his books, sets up quite nicely our focus in the humanities portion of the Chesapeake Semester. Horton begins his book with a focus on looking at things differently. That’s one question we might consider asking him: how has his way of looking at things changed or remained the same since he published Bay Country nearly 25 years ago? How did a recent project, working with a photographer, enhance his perspective? (keep in mind for your final project, you may well want or, indeed, need to consider multimedia ways of seeing the Bay). Do the photographs–and the writing–help him ensorcell or enchant his readers? Is this what it takes to ‘save the Bay’–enchantment?

Perhaps we can think of the photographs from the exhibit as a form of enchantment, a way to evoke wonder–much as it was when photography emerged. Today, in addition to photographic and video media, there is the wide world of digital media to consider as a form of enchantment. David Abram, a prominent, contemporary environmental writer has a website, Wild Ethics, that uses digital media (as well as older forms–writing, thinking, oral expression–to focus on its mission of awakening wonder. Something to keep in mind as you work your way toward your own final project.

Once you have your blog, go to the page Student Blogs and reply/comment on the page with your name and url for the blog. That way we can start to browse and share some writing.

Something I am thinking about–in terms of this question of the humanities and the imagination in relation to the Chesapeake. In an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s journal (you will get this the first class), Thoreau (one of Annie Dillard’s primary model for the environmental pilgrim) writes:

I standing twenty miles off see a crimson cloud in the horizon. You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red–but that is nothing to the purpose–for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood–makes my thoughts flow–and I have new and indescribable fancies and you have not touched the secret of that influence. If there is not something mystical in your explanation–something unexplainable–some element of mystery, it is quite insufficient. It there is nothing in it which speaks to my imagination–what boots it. What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding but robs the imagination.

Thoreau is, you might know, an ecologist before there is even the term; his journal is filled with scientific observation of his surroundings (mostly near his home in Concord, Mass.). So this isn’t simply a knock on science by a poet. In his view, scientific explanation and understanding requires some sort of imagination. I am interested to see if and how that kind of perspective will play out as you experience the Chesapeake. Do you agree? Does your understanding of the Chesapeake require some element of mystery? Is it feasible to have an element of the ‘unexplainable’ in your explanation of the Chesapeake–to friends, policy makers, future readers?

Any questions about the blog or the Writing section of the course before we meet for class, just e-mail.

SRM