Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Chapter 6. The Complexity of Places

c h a p t e r 6 The Complexity of Places s u e e l l e n c a m p b e l l There’s something compellingly immediate about places. Dirt, trees, houses, mosquitoes, a barking dog, the weight of the air: these things are so directly physical, so very present. Our personal reactions and associations draw us into their orbits as well: I caught tadpoles here as a child; I dream often of that house; this is where we watched those elk at twilight. Such sensory and emotional elements create our ordinary experiences of place. Then, too, we all see what we know about. Where English teachers see the settings of books by Thoreau or the Brontës, geomorphologists see the shapes of rivers and hills, historians see contested territories and changing land uses, ecologists see carbon budgets and energy circuits, painters see colors, shapes, and values, toxicologists see lingering poisons—and so on, in seemingly endless variations on perspective, specialized lenses, and kinds of vision. Sometimes it’s enough just to enjoy the feel of sunlight on skin or to think only about mineral uptake in a single grass species; some purposes require simplicity and focus. Yet these personal responses can make us feel that our understanding of any given place, any landscape, 8 4 m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s is complete, when of course it never is. For all places are endlessly complex—intricately composed not only of the immediate and personal but also of what other people can see, know, and remember; what is present but invisible; what is past and future, the deep time of geology and evolution, climate change, former human inhabitants; even what is somewhere else, like global economies, sources of acid rain, and migratory birds. Non-human and human elements are always woven together, too, an inevitability that makes “landscape” a useful word, combining as it does the non-human elements of land with our human scope of understandings, relationships, and effects. This is the challenge that over the last decade has shaped much of my work as researcher, writer, and teacher: to think and learn about the complexities of places. And I do mean challenge. There’s so much I don’t know and don’t really know how to learn, especially, though not only, in the sciences. It can take many frustrating hours to find even the simplest information, facts and concepts so basic to those in the field that books don’t explain them, such as “Why is carbon so important?” or “What counts as a salt?” And it’s hard to decipher and translate the language of unfamiliar disciplines, language that can sound deceptively familiar: a sentence like “What is needed is the incorporation of an eruption’s SO₂ production into its magnitude” looks easy enough but makes little sense without the right background and context. Still, I believe, understanding more fully where we live is important enough, and rewarding enough, to be worth the trouble. What I want to do here is look at what this task can mean in practical terms. First, I’ll give you an example from the book I wrote that started me along this path. Then I’ll talk briefly about the book I’m currently writing, one that foregrounds the multiple ways of understanding s u e e l l e n c a m p b e l l 8 5 landscapes. Finally, I’ll lay out a teaching exercise that aims to coax others into undertaking similar explorations. e v e n m o u n t a i n s v a n i s h I’ll start with some lines from the beginning of my book Even Mountains Vanish: Searching for Solace in an Age of Extinction (University of Utah Press, 2003). We had driven in earlier that afternoon across the Pajarito Plateau, past the bold signs for Los Alamos and into Bandelier National Monument, where we’d stopped at the rim of Frijoles Canyon to have our sandwiches in the sun. . . . I found a smooth spot on the ground, rolled my jacket into a pillow, and stretched out on my back. The air felt cool and clean, the sun warm against my skin, my every breath was fragrant with piñon and juniper, and a pair...