Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Chapter 1. Calamity Brook to Ground Zero

c h a p t e r 1 The afternoon is balmy for November, and the students aboard Riverkeeper ’s patrol boat have shed their jackets as they ride the current of Rondout Creek toward the Hudson. The creek has left an impression on them. From the barge-cluttered banks to the hillside ranks of condominiums , this battered creek looks nothing like the watershed they have come to know in the Hudson’s upper reaches. Here, they glide past gravel mines and industrial boatyards. By the time they drift past heaps of flattened automobiles lining the western shore—where antifreeze, gas, and transmission fluids drain directly into the creek—they look slightly dazed.¹ This creek would not seem out of place in most industrial landscapes, but it alarms these students. Since the end of August they have been working their way south from the Adirondack headwaters of the Hudson , learning to see the entire drainage as a single organic system. It is the only subject they will study this semester. The students have watched the river lose its innocence as they have paddled, sailed, and driven downriver toward the twenty-first century. They have learned about Calamity Brook to Ground Zero l a i r d c h r i s t e n s e n the lives of local inhabitants—both human and not—and pictured the Hudson through the eyes of Mahican traders and Romantic painters. Here, at Rondout Creek, they see it as a tool, a highway, a drain. Try making that point in a traditional classroom. Courses like this, in which students spend a block of fifteen credits studying a single place through overlapping disciplines, are central to the mission of Green Mountain College. Designed to engage students through local relevance or current controversy, these upper-level courses embody the school’s environmental approach to liberal arts education. On their weekly trips into the field, as well as in the classroom, students experience knowledge that is integrated and applied—a way of knowing that will help them think critically about the lives and homes awaiting them beyond commencement. As our college’s neighboring watershed to the south and west, the Hudson was an obvious choice for our 2001 block course. It is, after all, the nation’s largest Superfund site. Even as the Environmental Protection Agency was weighing options for cleaning up the river, communities up and down the Hudson splintered into shouting matches. The twenty students enrolled in the course had only to cross the Poultney River to see the argument rage in signs along New York roadsides. Some residents, along with downstream activists, insisted that the General Electric Corporation must pay for dredging the riverbed of spilled carcinogens —the notorious polychlorinated biphenyls, or pcbs. Others argued that dredging would simply stir up the chemicals, making matters worse. The scorched remains of a large anti-dredging banner in Fort Edward, New York, registered the heat of local emotions. From the moment my colleagues and I began planning this course,  t e a c h i n g i n p l a c e however, we found ourselves wading into the unknown. To begin with, this was not our neighborhood. Not even close. Of the four of us teaching the course, none was from any farther east than Iowa. We had learned our trades at doctoral programs in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Colorado—three of us quite recently. We had been drawn to Green Mountain College by the dream of place-based teaching, but we were long on theory, short on practice. Beyond that, I had my own doubts—common, I think, to those trained in writing and literature—about what I could contribute to such a course. It made sense having a biologist on board, and Dr. Meriel Brooks had already taught a similar course on the Champlain Basin . And certainly students could use a social historian like Dr. Patricia Moore to help them understand how the river’s human communities had evolved since European colonization. Dr. Jon Jensen, from environmental studies, would help untangle the web of policies and agencies that regulate the river’s health. But was the region’s literature really an essential component of the course? Wouldn’t a geologist have made more sense? L Our studies began at the headwaters, high in the blue Adirondacks. Under a cloudless late-summer sky, we pitched camp near the...