Thinking through Monterey

I don't have an answer for disappearing from the online world upon my return to the East Coast, except for the ones that follow. Can I use the excuse of a long weekend in Baltimore, prepping my library for the first day of school (today), or prepping my kitchen for, well, anything?

As I'm back at work and people ask me to describe the trip in one or two sentences, it becomes clear just how hard it is to synthesize three weeks.

(The V-shape of the library makes it impossible to photograph, but it's ready for students.)

(My kitchen is ready for all sorts of activities, but eating is not currently one of them.)

The Biology/Ecology has stuck with me more than the English discussions, perhaps because there was so much new information. I keep making connections to what we learned; here's just one example. As I was discussing the community read, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives today, my advisees were debating whether they'd ever consider working as zookeepers. One said that she doesn't think people get as attached to sea mammals as land mammals. Another responded that sea mammals are more human-like than fish. And finally, a third said that it would be fine to work with animals without faces. And I'm back to thinking about the tide pool and the aquarium.

Anyone up for exploring these ideas by (re)reading E.O. Wilson's Consilience with me this fall?

Keeping all that in mind, let's look at another thought from The Sea of Cortez.

"...Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too." And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

Keep checking back. There might be a short break as the school year beginsm, but I plan to keep updating once or twice a week. Enjoy the school year!