Of Space and Place

Here is another entry for today’s collective set of weblog posts for our Ecotone wiki. Excerpts from these posts can be found here.

A year ago last November, it was late in the afternoon in a meeting in Houston on Internet map services, and drifting off, I wrote the following tanka:

The division, which my little poem hints at, between modern spatial technologies and the almost mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality is what is leading me to write about place. As somebody professionally involved with the former, I find I need the latter for balance.

I have always been interested in natural history, and aware of the long tradition of natural history writing. This led me to study zoology in college and for awhile in graduate school before realizing I wasn’t meant to have a career as an evolutionary biologist. My search for another discipline to enter led me to geography. Why not? I liked the holism of the field, and have loved maps since the beginning (the tale is that I taught myself to read at age three or so from studying maps). I could combine interests in conservation, maps and mapping, and computing, by working on geographic information systems.

But I also began to read more widely in geography, and learned about the humanistic side of geography in addition to the technical side in which I was specializing. Authors such as the landscape historian John Stilgoe and his teacher J.B. Jackson became favorites of mine. My old interests in natural history thus expanded to wondering about the cultural meanings of a landscape.

The danger in our modern world of geodatabases, remote sensing technologies, and GPS mapping tools with sub-meter accuracies, is that what cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in computer maps gets forgotten about. These spatial tools are eminently technologies for the managerial mindset, designed to support the archetypal ‘decision-maker’. Lost here is any notion of place as narrative, or place as history.

I was always one for a saunter anyway. As John Stilgoe puts it, cycling along at 11 miles an hour is an ideal way to explore the landscape (at such a speed one can gaze straight through picket fences), and wandering on bicycle or foot is deep in my bones. If every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to light.