Reading

I love to read.  I read books, of course, but I also read landscapes.  As an ecologist, I am always considering the ecology of the places I go.  Ecology requires an understanding of relationships and how these relationships impact the development of communities and ecosystems.  Each place has an ecological story – a story of the non-living forces that acted to create soil, how seeds found their way to those small patches of soil, how the plants grew, changed the light reaching the soil and how the types of plants and animals changed over time.

Given enough time, the story of each landscape will be influenced by people, and because people are intricately tied to the landscape the stories of people are influenced by the landscape.  Robert MacFarlane, in his recent book Landmarks, uses literature to describe how language helps us understand place.  Throughout this book he reminds us how powerful “language constructs the human relation to place” (p.21).  He asserts that children are “losing a literacy of the land” (p.23), and in this wonderful text he develops a phrasebook that helps us to “know how nature proceeds…to keep wonder alive in our descriptions of it: to provide celebrations of not-quite-knowing, of mystification, of excess.” (p. 32).

In the spring of 2015, I participated in a seminar on reading.  During this seminar my colleagues and I explored the history of reading and celebrated the many ways that each of our disciplines read.  I began to contemplate the importance of reading landscapes .   Living life slowly, paying attention to detail and enjoying the wonder of stories I see or hear across landscapes is the way I desire to spend my sabbatical during the spring 2016 semester.  I am also excited to learn about new landscapes as I spend time in the landscape of words.  As I prepared for my sabbatical, I asked my friends and colleagues to recommend books that I should read.  My goal is to read 100 during my sabbatical.  The number isn’t as important as the landscape of words that will result from my time spent in these texts.  This blog is a place for me to share what I am learning through my reading project.  I also will share what I am learning as I attempt to live a slower life exploring the landscapes I encounter.

Reference:

MacFarlane R. 2015.  Landmarks.  Penguin.  UK. 400 pages.