Soren's Rocks

I confess to immense knowledge-envy:  I've always been fascinated with rocks, but have never systematically explored geology.  When my other (right now difficult) work-world was planning on going to the Yucatan next May, I was already planning how I might put my hand on the iridium layer of the asteroid collision; I have a weird obsession with trilobites, back to the 2nd grade; I used to carry chunks of pink granite in my pocket.  So, I delight in Soren's new rock-knowledge, especially in being able to see these eons, not just read about them.

Ominous, though, the thought of coal here in Boone County.  I hope not in any abundance:  I have visions (which in medieval times might have made me either saint or heretic) of machines larger than Stewart Hall, but smaller than Sam's Club or HyVee, crushing the landscape, changing Missouri into West Virginia.

And, I confess, that I kind of love the road cuts, along Stadium Blvd. and south 63 toward Jeff City.  Where there aren't signs that threaten sniper fire or Star Wars laser incineration for stopping, I do like to stop, pick up the fallen rocks, haul them off for ceremonial circles, fence repair, and so on.  Each rock seems valuable, storied, in ways I can't unfold. 

I know that geology people, and the "real science" people in Geography, would laugh, but I'd love to go out to Stadium or 63 or the rock quarry, with someone who could point out the layers, connect abstract time with quite-solid reality.

Best would be Soren's ancient oceans--I want not just the idea.  I want to touch an equatorial seabed and know what and when it is, to imagine that moment of earth and fill it with life, and write the poetry that scales us beside this.

Tonight in my intro creative writing class, I showed Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the Scottish environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy.  For that class, the purpose was to connect with the power of image (we're doing our poetry unit).  But Goldsworthy speaks some things useful to us:

"we misread the landscape when we think of it as being pastoral and pretty"

He talks about trying to caputre the moment/sense of a specific place with his creations:  "you feel as if you've touched the heart of the place."  He wants to "[see] something that was always there, but you were blind to."

He works with leaves or ice or iron-rock pigment or dandelion blooms with a river, and says that "river is not dependent upon water--we're talking about the flow."  When he is invited to NY to put in a huge installation (a stone wall), he lets the stone-workers do their job:  "their dialogue with the stone is what makes the wall," while he directs them to build according to "the line that is in sympathy with the place throught which it passes."

Hmm.  Rocks.

later, bob

Learning About Rocks

Bob reminded me the other day, via a piece he is writing, how my preparations for the field camp in Colorado this summer got me learning about rocks. For the first time, I was going to be leading the physical geography section of the camp, and I knew next-to-nothing about the geology of the region (this still is the case, though I can recite a rough stratigraphic sequence). So I got some books, and set to learning.

Way down deep is the Precambrian. At the field site in Colorado, which is a little mountain valley the size of the island of Manhattan, these rocks are at the head of the valley, exhumed from beneath the earth when the modern Rockies were made. They are old, 1.7 billion years, and they show their age in their warped and wrinkled expression, like an old man who just wants to go to back to sleep. A Great Unconformity (always capitalized, a major event of some billion years in which anything and everything that was deposited got eroded away, at least in the story told by geologists) separates those rocks from the next ones in the sequence, the Fremont and Harding and Manitou dolomites and limestones. At about 400 million years old, they've just entered retirement, perched majestically high above the valley, resting formidably on the back of the Precambrian curmudgeon.

But the reason for my post is actually in the next sequence, the Williams Canyon limestone of the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian Age - 320 million years old. In this part of Colorado, these limestones are not well expressed, mostly because the Ancestral Rockies punched through them a short 20 million years later and forced them off into rivers and seas and oceans. They have been tilted, crunched, eroded, eaten away by water into caves -- just not much left. Almost imperceptible, and just a footnote in the sequence as you go up the geologic column (which mercifully for the reader, I won't do here).

Suffice it to say, I spent those three weeks in constant geologic-learning mode, anxious that I just didn't know enough about the rocks to actually be teaching these students something about them. And so, going to sleep each night, I would recite the sequence of strata over in my head: Precambrian to Fremont to Williams Canyon to Fountain to Morrison to Dakota and on and on and on until you get to the present.

Fieldcamp's over. I get back to Columbia, happy to be home. My house is so big (compared to the cabin), my mattress so restful, my routines so comfortable, my family so welcoming and loving. I stopped learning about rocks. The feeling was something like this: I'm home now; I don't need to learn about this place.

Three or four days back, driving around town, it strikes me: I have absolutely no idea what formation these rock outcrops are here, whereas in Colorado, I would have been compulsively looking them up in a guidebook. The outcrops here in Columbia, I realized, mean something different to me, something of a lesser order: they are sidenotes on the trip to the grocery store, something that had to be blown away to put Stadium Drive in, something to pass by without notice. They are flat in orientation, drab, uninteresting - no mountain came through. They haven't been othered, made exotic.

They are Mississippian. Different formation than the Williams Canyon, but Mississippian nonetheless: mostly Keokuk and Burlington limestones. (The latter is the formation in which the Rock Bridge caves occur). As you head north in town, where I live, it transitions into Pennsylvanian - coal, shales, some clays - these formations are less resistant and so do not form the nice outcrops you see on the road cuts in the middle and southern parts of town. They tell us that we were near the equator then. These stones are depositional relics of tropical seas, the limestones made from the calcium rich shells of marine life, the coal from the decomposed organic matter of dead things living in swamps near the shore.

They are the rocks here, at home.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

We discussed last Friday possible directions for the Geography Environment and Society Reading Group.  There is concern for the environment, but we don't seem too sure what to read.  One suggestion was for various videos to provide a focus.

Ok.  Here's my 24 bits:  Let's start at the start of the modern environmental movement, and take another look at Rachel Carson.  We all know about her, at least sort of, though I suspect not so many have read Silent Spring straight through, nor looked at her earlier works, nor the rather astounding career that led her to her last book.  Rob Nixon, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reminds us that this is the 50th anniversary of the release of Silent Spring, in his article, "Rachel Carson's Prescience."  Good background.

But we could also spend 60 minutes and watch the PBS documentary, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, available through the MU media library for $14 (VHS), # 362100 .  It's a great show, and perhaps many younger folks haven't seen all those clouds of DDT that used to be sprayed everywhere (like from the truck that came through our neighborhood, which we would follow on our kid-bikes, breathing in all that advanced American industry).

[I am curious about the 1963 film (16mm, not even VHS) called Silent Spring of Rachel Carson (120548), described in the catalog blurb as "An examination of the questions brought up in naturalist Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring." Are we destroying ourselves with pesticides? Do they upset the balance of nature? Miss Carson speaks on her own views, her critics are given an opportunity to answer her. With Eric Sevareid and Jay L. McMullen."]

Another film about a recent activist: Marion Stoddart: The Work of 1000 --not sure how/where it is available around here.

Would it be worthwhile to read at least the "silent town" intro of the book?  A chapter or two, esp. the last?

In the same line, would it be worthwhile for us to go back and read other folks like Aldo Leopold?
Or any number of contemporary writers--John McPhee, Gary Nabhan [books -- I really like Singing the Turtles to the Sea, and the older, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves], Bill McKibben?  Work toward Wild Dog Dreaming?



later, bob

Aaron's Complaint

No doubt, this will be a distortion, but let me give voice to what Aaron G was, I think, saying in the Environment and Society Reading Group (Geography Dept.) last Friday.  Aaron is a new grad student (as opposed to me, distinctly an old grad student), recently back from years of Peace Corps eliding into NGO work in Peru.  I paraphrase:  "Our lives are satured with ecological imperative, and yet, here at a major center of higher learning, I find little that addresses in any immediate way the impending collapse of our biosphere.  Academics, sad to say, disappoint me, having little more concern than the ordinary oblivious American citizen.  I find that America lives without any sense of either practical or moral urgency, and I find that incomprehensible--and horrifying."

I think he implied, though was too good-mannered to say, that he felt that academics exist with a more culpable complacency, as once American academic folks espoused an intellectual and civil leadership, which has vanished in the constant waves of economic and political intimidation.  (Perhaps I exceed Aaron's voice here.)

Urgency?  Here's one popular account, with which the Conservation Biology Reading group started their semester, Bill McKibben's Global Warming's Terrifying New Math .  This article suggests that if we simply do the math, looking at fossil fuel resources scheduled to be developed, and the amounts of atmospheric carbon that will be released, we won't limit climate change to 2 degrees C (already in the realm of cheesy sci-fi movies), but may push all the way to a disastrously close, this century 6 degree C shift.  (McKibben suggests that would be a scenario out of eco-horror films, but doesn't picture for us what that would mean.  I think that would be an interesting project in futuring.) 

The biology professor sponsering the CB group just now says he actually believes we have closed the window where any public/community action will make any difference.

A sidetrack.  I like the Conservation Biology people.  The grad students introduce themselves and append the lab they work for, as an aspect of their identity.  When they talk science, including climate change, they get it.  They look at the numbers, they know the science, and yep, we're screwed.  They don't see why everyone doesn't get it.  They much believe in scientific truth, singular Truth, more Allah than the ambiguous Christian trinity.  Truth.  No post-structural turn.  No Donna Haraway.  I mentioned "indigenous science" last year, and that became a brief silence, a bump on the tape before they went on.  "Place" has less resonance for them, because they believe in universals.  Yet, they do get the science.

Geography?  Well, I don't know.  Joe H. does still bring in those population charts, the ones layered from the bottom up, showing Nigeria and Egypt and here and there all resting on the explosive stacks of youth, the sort of thing anathema to political ecology.  (I don't trust political ecology, which seems like it could be used in matters of environmental justice and food security, but whose belligerence and internal ideology prevents any serious long-term vision.)  Mike U. would know the science of climate.  And then?  Wish I could channel Aaron here, but I guess I'll just say in my own voice that I don't find in Geography much familiarity with any of the radical ecologies/ethics, which all insist on a reconfiguring of living human relations and economies, not simply a hope that "better education" or "rational" investigations, nor technological fixes will make a difference.  (Radical ecologies:  Deep Ecology, ecofeminisms, bioregionalism, social ecology...  I much like Carolyn Merchant's book on this.)  Nor familiarity with the imaginative literature that extrapolates, tests, exposes.  Even Leslie Silko's Gardens in the Dunes portrays environmental fault lines in our culture, from the perspective of native "outsiders."

The old complaint--that we/universities/globalized-imperial civilization talk about the globe, structure knowledge globally, but apply very little to changing local conditions nor understanding local knowledges.  Wendell Berry, (in an essay on the top shelf in my office where I am not) says that rural peoples and states are colonized by this mindset. 

And so we gaze out the window of Stewart 102...fascinated by the storm.

later, bob

The Octopus Among Us

If we think about what drives land use in Boone County, once, long ago, we might have said the Missouri River, or perhaps one of those trails to the far west...

But now, clearly, land use is shaped by the University, whose emblem should perhaps not be a tiger.

           to

?

I'd identify 4 obvious ways that this happens. 

1.  There is the area of the central campus itself.  While there is a stable, if always under reconstruction, core or the red and white campuses, contiguous expansion continues, bounded only by the resistance of people's attachment to places on the boundaries.  Such attachment didn't work for The Shack, but so far people's memory has been a buffer for places such as Shakespeare's Pizza and The Berg.

2.  The University owns and acquires land throughout the county, for various research purposes.

3.  Sports and business--the economic impact of the University shapes the rest of the city, supporting more variety and color than any midwestern town of some 80k could reasonably expect without government and parental cash-bleeding pocketbooks, even as it also endows us with more pizza places and nondescript bars than we need.  And sports?  Football weekends float many businesses through the long droughts of summer, and the swell of football has developed enough hotels that Columbia can also sustain a robust convention trade.

4.  But one huge impact--housing.  Three groups are involved--staff, students, and faculty.  Staff housing may be the least identifiable, since this population is less separate from the general community--"it's a job."  Students do tend to live in clusters, once heavily in the dorms, and in the grand mansions of the Greek system, and now in places like East Campus and the fringes of mouldering roach motels and septic wastelands where George Romero could easily set the next zombie apocalypse film.  These have been much supplemented by mushroom pop up apartment buildings, a few stable and long-term, and many rushed to completion even in this year of supposed economic glum.  A number of these are downtown, which will encourage not only a new party scene, but might, might, encourage a resurgence in the District with walkable services and entertainment.  Others, like The Links, many sites to the southeast, and the new burgeoning Domain, remove students from both downtown and the University.  (And there is what one friend described as a kind of 'bait and switch'--overly ambitious developers, building on whatever land they snap up, filling apartments with first-year discount rents, selling the property to buyers who find they must vastly increase rents to make a profit, which drives students out, and...)

Interesting could be the patterns of faculty housing.  In the 60s and 70s, many were concentrated in the West Broadway "faculty ghetto"--at least many of the more prosperous, senior faculty.  Naively, it seems like many faculty have now migrated south of town, into new covenanted subdivisions, or becoming pioneers of our local southern amenity landscape.  I wonder whether faculty propelled the shift, or if developers coaxed this new reality.  Soren mentions that there may also be an economic division in choice faculty zones.

It would be fun to trace faculty housing clusters through 2 or 3 base years, to look for patterns, before some more qualitative interviews.

Wish I knew Actor Network Theory for all this, but I don't.  Anyway, Matt F. is going to unravel all of this.


later, bob

Daniel Woodrell

Back when I was much looking for intersections of English and Geography, I took Daniel Woodrell's novel Tomato Red with me one Christmas, and read this tale of Ozark woe by the pool in St. Lucia.  I had some insights into that book (need to go find that now-ancient journal), but delayed sketching anything out until I could at least read Woodrell's currently famous book, Winter's Bone (also now a movie).

Well, I did finally manage to read Winter's Bone last weekend.  The two books are both set in the south-borderlands of Missouri, right down where civilization fades into Arkansas, near Woodrell's residence in West Plains, MO (where I remember passing through when I was 17 on the way to a very rainy float trip--and was it West Plains where we stopped at 2 am or so, and just sat in the middle of the road to see what that felt like?).

The two books are very different.  In WB, the characters are part of a very closed, religiously bound group of families who once would have been moon-shining hillbillies with shotguns, and are now prime meth-cookers, with a lot more weapons.  They have a firm attachment to place, but a larger "geography" than the even-poorer white trash trailer folks in Tomato Red. 

I find two directions I want to explore here--the sense of place in WB, and the extreme limits of the geographic imagination (a consequence of poverty) of folks in TR.

It seems like a false trail to simply try to line up the fictional places with the "real" map.

I also note that I would call esp. WB a kind of fictional community ethnography, though I probably need to be anxious about the definitions of ethnography that Elaine L. is currently using.

I wonder what Larry Brown would make of the "Fist of the Gods" and folk religion of the people in WB--it's very much his territory, though these folks seem not so connected to the wider political/racist ideologies he investigated.

Well, I'll see what I can figure out.

An interesting interview:  Daniel Woodrell: The Ozark daredevil.

later, bob

Fun with Photos

J. B. Harley, "Deconstructing the Map"
"Much of the power of the map...is that it operates behind a mask of a seemingly neutral science" (14).
                                                    +
 Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps
in discussing maps of election results and the polarization they insist on:  "every map ever made--or to be made--is an argument...all masquerade as maps of the election results" (43).
 =, that is, although surely someone has done this somewhere, let's make state of birth masks for each grad student in the department, arrange them vaguely in a national pattern, and photo that:  our own "Masquerade of Maps."

                                         &

 Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps
"And to make a map you have to make these choices:  there are no naked, no absolute election results; there is no innocent way to see them" (44).

Let's talk Soren into having birth-state (or just Missouri) maps for his two older kids, and photo the two of them, to be titled "The Innocents of Maps."

I'm not quite ready to speculate on naked maps.  Matt?

 bob