University of North Texas - Department of Geography
During the last week I have edited and posted five essays by my students on local ethnobiology. Their essays are based on observations of a small tract of space that they delineated and visited several times. You can find the details of the assignment here; I must confess that David Haskell has been assigning similar exercises in his ecology class, thus the idea to have students do this is not fully mine nor is it original. I have a couple of observations based on my several readings of the essays. First, I want to comment on the benefits of the exercise that seem to be shared across the experiences students had. The main benefit for students has been to simply spend time outdoors away from the inundating stuff of contemporary society. This is not a full escape, but each student experienced something at a local scale that they had not before because they had read about other people doing it (e.g., David Haskell or Gary Paul Nabhan) or they had heard about other people studying aspects of nature and life outdoors (e.g., Jessica Beckham’s work on bumblebees), or they had recently had conversations with ethnographers studying ecological anthropology (e.g., Jim Veteto). But they also did it for another reason, they were asked to (in the form of an exam). As usual, the only real difference between “experts” and “students” is level of experience.
There are smaller benefits, such as some gain in biological knowledge, consideration of insects, plants (especially those students recognize as weeds), turtles, snakes, and so forth. Some impressions recorded by students are more correct than others—in the proximate sense of Western science, Linnaean taxonomy, and so forth—but mastering detailed taxonomy or systematic ecology or even ethnobiology was not the point of the exercise. The point was to slow down, to record one’s own ethnobiology of a place for a time. That is, the greatest benefit of this process was not the production of new knowledge. Rather is was what environmental philosopher Albert Borgmann terms “disclosure,” or the revealing of something intricate that dwells beyond the scene of contemporary experience. My friend and colleague, Porter Swentzell calls this “having respect before knowledge.” I am totally committed to this inductive approach in my ethnobiology class. My father and I talked about it this weekend as we prepared smoked salmon and steelhead trout in my backyard, agreeing that education is standardized enough and that information-based approaches, though necessary in many cases, become stale when applied universally.
During the next week, I will finish posting the midterm essays, and students are invested in the next round. Their final exam assignment is to observe their mandalas for longer visits stretched over a lengthier period. Make no mistake; what I have asked them to do is work. From what I’ve read, students have had to break down barriers (emotional, psychological, even physical) to do this. They have had to answer questions such as, “why am I doing this?” They have had to confront the emotions of feeling that slowing down and observing is a decline in productivity. That is, they have had to exercise patience to listen, look, feel, and smell. And, for a small amount of time, they have had to unplug from the addictive trappings of society. I identify with them; my walks in the woods behind my house represent the same experiences. Even if their experiences extend for only a small period beyond the end of the course, their observations have been inspiring.
References Cited:
Borgmann, A. 2000. The Transparency and Contingency of the Earth. In Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community, edited by R. Frodeman, pp. 99–106. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Haskell, David George. 2013. A Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature. Penguin Books.
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