photo credit: quinn.anya

Pronunciation: \ˈmi-s^ən-ˌthrōp\
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek misanthrōpos hating humankind, from misein to hate + anthrōpos human being
Date: 1683
: a person who hates or distrusts humankind

Would you consider yourself a misanthrope? I suspect that most, if asked if they hated or distrusted humanity, would say no. Take ethical consideration, for example. We, who are interested in the more-than-human, often argue that it is the human that sits at the zenith of consideration. And this isn’t strictly an intellectual argument. One has to look at how our culture has chosen to treat, a proxy for consideration, the non-human for confirmation. I have a hypothesis, though. I think that we’re suffering, culturally, from an undiagnosed case of misanthropy.

I turn to a few examples, that together, have pointed me in this direction. First, from my research with children at summer camp about their concepts of nature [pdf alert]. When describing what nature was to them, a category emerged where the attributes related directly to the degree of human manipulation of nature. I wrote:

While most participants believed that humans were a part of nature, whenever humans were physically involved with the natural world, the natural world was negatively impacted and changed.  When asked if a cabin was part of nature, this twelve year old (IM3) male said that: “I think … humans build things, say this nature lodge, it’s made of cut-up trees and doesn’t really look like trees anymore it just looks like slice of wood and it’s, it’s been turned into not nature.”For some reason, human manipulation of what is seen as “nature,” makes that object or thing “not nature.” (p. 42)

Now, in my dissertation work, I’ve been thinking about people’s reactions to the urban. Here’s why one birder likes to bird at Rondeau:

It is just good to get away from the rat race.  Hustle and bustle and I say about on a day like today.  You do not hear the sounds of cars going up and down the road and you do not have factories, do not have pollution right next to you.

You get away from the rat race and the stress and you get to a place like this and walk along the fresh air, sounds of birds, sights of birds and not even just birds, you might even see a raccoon, a snake, or whatever it may be and it just take your mind away from the hustle and bustle.

Birding (in provincial parks and other “natural spaces”) becomes an antidote to the city. Why? Because the city is not nature. And why is the city not nature? Because our presence is obvious. We change tempo. At Rondeau, there are traces of our culture—beyond it being a forested peninsula, it is not a pristine space in any special way. Yet, it appears to many visitors as such. In part because those forested spaces appear to be less contaminated by our presence.

This is what I mean by saying we’re misanthropic. The city, with its urban matrix of organisms, from native to non-native, is still a part of nature. Yet, in our eyes our presence often taints the natural world. We hate ourselves.

Common environmental narratives are full of similar examples: The Nature of Things’ documentaries are often centred on how our bodily presence is at risk of irrevocably de-naturing the world. When not condemning actions or making arguments to change, the documentaries work to reinforce how true nature is devoid of humans. Here are excerpts from the blurb of a recent documentary on Peruvian Red Monkeys:

Scientist Mark Bowler is on a mission to find the rare and elusive red-faced Uakari monkey. His search takes audiences deep into the remote rainforests of Peru – a dangerous journey of many days.

Journeying from the bustling city of Iquitos into largely forgotten worlds, we join Dr. Bowler for an exotic riverboat cruise down the Amazon and up the Yavari river to the Lago Preto black water preserve.

Unfortunately, as logging moves into the area forest ecosystems are being threatened, and hunting could potentially wipe out the entire species.

Only in leaving the city, traces of us, behind do we find (a threatened) nature¹.

Yes, these are important stories to tell. But the narratives often deployed work to reinforce our separation from some kind of true, pristine nature, when, in fact, we need to start thinking about how we can recognize and connect with the kind of nature that our presence shapes.

Because, as I began, we are not really ready to re-think our position as being on the top when it comes to ethical consideration. More, not less, spaces, as humanity’s population increases, will become visibly “touched” by human hands. And we need different ways to think about ourselves and tell our stories.

1. And as a side note, as someone who has visited Iquitos, it, and the surrounding forest is not a “largely forgotten world”

photo credit: bill barber

As of January 3rd, 2010 there were 3,015 Tim Hortons in Canada. Today, Tim Hortons outlined plans to add 900 outlets by 2013. The population of Canada is around 33,000,000. This means there will soon be 1 Tim Hortons store for every 10,000 Canadians.

By comparison there are 9.6 family physicians for every 10,000 Canadians. Sub-saharan Africa has a physician to population ratio of 1.3:10,000, but then again, they don’t have any Tim Hortons restaurants.

Yet, while reading Louv and now appearing elsewhere, a reflection that the “way it was”—recreating experiences of our youth for today’s youth—emerged and seems to be promoted as one answer to our culture’s disconnect to the more-than-human. Take, for example, this video blog from Mark Morey, founder of the Institute for Natural Learning, to Ontario environmental educators. Here’s the whole 4:24:

Morey has been invited by the P.I.N.E Project to come and share his experience “connecting people of all ages to nature“. And not to say that this isn’t intriguing or a noble cause I believe in. I was interested enough about Morey’s experience to want to join the talk at OISE on March 6th.

But I was interested in what Morey said at 3:11:

So I’m looking forward to coming up there and sharing more stories about how we can have a powerful life together. Happy families, healthy families. Look back to what it was that we had when we were younger and how we can renew those things again so we can be strong, resilient and joyful.

Now, I’m not going to judge Morey’s entire message based on two sentences from a video blog, but the perceived sentiment, coupled with Louv’s penchant for looking for inspiration in his experiences growing up worries me a bit. I’m worried that high profile thinkers and practitioners are looking back at, even romanticizing, their childhood as an example of connecting to nature done right.

Lying underneath those beliefs is an assumption that is troubling: that a static relationship with the natural world should exist. And if not static, then the relationship with nature crystallized in our youth should be the model for the relationship for others.

Rightly or wrongly, the state of the more-than-human, largely due to anthropocentric inputs, is changing at a faster inter-generational pace. I don’t deny the changes our collective actions have made to the environment but nature has not ended. Rare wildlife live in brownfields. There is no steady-state in ecology. Disturbance is the rule, not the exception. The “nature” we experienced as children is not the same “nature” that our children will experience.

Western school-aged learners today are deeply impacted (pdf alert) by the increasing “speed” of information through the emergence of new technologies (broadly: the Internet, mobile phones, computers). Regardless whether you like this development or not, it doesn’t appear that we’re at the cusp of the cultural change necessary for the re-evaluation of the central location of these technologies in children’s lives.

Louv rages against video games. With him, I agree that they’re poor substitutes for first-hand experience. He asks, on page 96 (of the revised version) how children can build a sense of wonder or spirit of place when playing video games. The crux for me, though, is that we’re not going to wrestle the PS3 controller out of every child’s hand: childhood now includes the experience of video games, good or bad. Louv’s solutions do not come in questioning the form, structure or content of video games. They’re judged as a homogenized whole without any kind of merit.

Yet, Louv’s childhood is to be mined. Tree forts ought to be built, kids need to be free-range. My Dad had access to woods and fields in the 1950s because his family moved to the suburbs: those woods and fields became the next subdivision in a few years time. Subdivisions of the mid-century became the drivers (no pun intended) behind our unsustainable North American car-centric culture today. Ignoring this milieu and hearkening back to when kids played outdoors all day is myopic.

Returning to Louv’s larger question about connecting to the more-than-human, some observations: nature changes, culture changes, children change. Practices for knowing the more-than-human should change too.

The same kind of experience happened again this morning: out with the dogs, chatting with Heather, paying attention to what Griff was doing at the end of his leash and out of the periphery of my consciousness, my mind flips into action: there is something out of the ordinary calling “out there”. Now, having had the Starling experience in the last month, and having people and dogs to draw my attention, I made a mental note of its auditory presence but then moved on.

Off our mixed Canid and Hominid foraging flock moved to get a cup shade-grown of coffee and a teabiscuit (I say foraging flock because Ollie and Griff managed to convince us that we should offer them some crumbs). We returned home following our same path and in the same spot on our out-bound leg, the song snapped into consciousness. And it was something out of the ordinary. Just like my gut told at the time that the bird I heard last month was a Starling, my gut told me that this wasn’t.

Making the identification

photo credit: nosha

So there I stood, looking. And I saw a little brown shape, with its back to me, just above eye-height in a shrub about twelve feet in front of me. My mind said: Sparrow. Right size and shape. Right place, if you will. Fair enough. What kind of sparrow? Though I’m sure I’ve heard something out of the ordinary, this bodily presence could be what I’m not looking for: one of the resident House Sparrows (Passer domesticus). Of course, I don’t have binoculars with me. To get a better look, and throw away the possibility that this is a House Sparrow, I need to get closer.

So I approach. Moving to my right rather than towards the bird, more of its head and neck come into view and I can quickly discard the possibility that this is a House Sparrow. From this distance, I easily see a small white bib underneath the head, pointing an identification toward White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). I say to Heather, “I think this is a White-Throated Sparrow”. I’m not ready, however,  to say this with certainty.

I start asking myself what else this could be; what other field marks I would need see to decide that it is, in fact, a White-throat. And so I purse my lips and softly warble out the White-Throat’s song; pieces of which had snapped me to attention earlier this morning. It turns out I don’t need to see anything else. I need to hear. In a moment the White-throat returns a version of its song, more staccato than I’m used to hearing and missing portions here and there. But there isn’t any mistaking it: a White-throated Sparrow.

A White-throated Sparrow! At the end of February! In Toronto! If the wet snow underneath my feet and the Skunk Cabbage popping up along the Cedarvale Ravine wasn’t enough, then this is a certain sign of spring. I start wondering just how unusual its presence here at this time is. I don’t know White-throat’s winter range off-hand, but I suspect that while some individuals may spend the winter in Southern Ontario, most over-winter further south.

Watching the White-throat: the chance encounter in birding

As I walked home I began to reflect on the experience. Had I been birding? A strange question perhaps, but in my research about birders, many participants suggested that it was only when they purchased binoculars that they had become “birders”. When I was collecting data, I always could identify a birder by the presence of binoculars around their neck. Backyard birders—those who feed birds in their backyard—often had a pair of binoculars beside the window that faced on to the feeders. Only bird rescuers, who made a point to not call themselves birders, did not use binoculars in their practice. In short, binoculars=birding.

In theorizing the practice of birding, I developed a model of birding practice with three axes¹: knowledge, ethical motivation and intent. Finding examples of birding with intent is easy: whenever you pick up your binoculars and head out the door looking birds, you’ve got intent. Finding examples of birding without that intent is more difficult (and is why, in part, in my model there is a dotted line on the intent half of the intent axis).  But there is little question, when you read my narrative of what I was doing this morning, I was birding.

So let me propose that the chance encounter in birding are those fleeting glances of Red-Tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) along the highway while you’re sitting in the passenger seat; the moments as you’re busy doing something else that your eyes are drawn to the sky as a Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) flies overhead in its characteristic up-and-down flight; moments where you’re drawn from your activity, your inner thoughts or your mindlessness and turn your attention outward towards the more-than-human around you.

And there is something significant in that. For one, you have to be open to noticing the shapes and sounds that might lead to a chance encounter. The practice of birding—classically constructed birding—requires a sustained attention to the world. Through experience, you learn to distinguish between the movements of leaves in the wind and a Ruby-Crown Kinglet (Regulus calendula) moving along a branch looking for food. The act of looking, to strain and try and to perceive the the head shape of the Scaup (Aythya sp.) in your spotting scope not only means that you can confirm that what you saw was a Lesser Scaup (Aythya affinis) but, more important than identification, it is an offer to start looking at the world in more detail.

As, or perhaps, if you take up that offer to pay more attention, more of the world unfurls before you. Sight, sound, even smell and touch proctor previously hidden experiences: you begin to notice the song out of place; recognize movement in your peripheral vision as a fleeting bird; the places to expect and the shape to perceive of unexpected birds. True, anyone can experience a chance encounter with birds. What sets birders apart, based on my experience and observation, is that more and more chance encounters open up for birders because of their practice. Birding helps shape the birder to perceive differently and attune to the Aves among us.

Thus, birding is not just strictly an act of identification, but becomes a practice of phenomenology; of being increasingly open and attentive, subconsciously and consciously to the phenomena within our umwelt, or perceived surrounding world.

1. Not the woodchopping kind, by the way. Axes as in the plural of axis.

photo credit: jnthnhys

The Toronto Star is reporting that a local plan to tap Norway Maples (Acer platanoides) this spring, collect sap and boil it down into maple syrup has hit a snag (no pun intended) with the proposal to tap the Norway Maples found in city parks: Toronto’s urban forestry department believes that tapping is “detrimental” to the trees.

When I first read the story, I was concerned that there had been a misquote and the plan was to tap Sugar Maples (Acer saccharum) rather than Norway Maples. I checked in with Laura Reinsborough, fellow graduate from the Faculty of Environmental Studies and project coordinator for Not Far From the Tree (the organization behind this idea) if NFFTT’s plans were to tap Sugar vs. Norway Maples. Not so! NFFTT has a post up that explains the whole program in detail.

For the production of syrup, it looks like they only real difference is the lower percentage of sugar in a Norway Maple’s sap. Typically speaking, it takes 40 litres of Sugar Maple sap to make 1 litre of syrup. Based on their research NFFTT is suggesting they will need to collect 60 litres of Norway Maple sap to get that same 1 litre of syrup. Beyond that, the Norway Maple syrup is supposed to be comparable to Sugar Maple syrup.

While NFFTT has to be polite when dealing with the city, I can be a bit more blunt: I call bullshit on the city’s position. Here’s why. Norway Maples are a non-native species of tree that a preferred for urban planting because they often can deal with the stresses of urban settings better than other species of maples. While urban planting practices are changing, they were often planted as a monoculture: street after street of Norway Maple as the street tree. The problem with the Norway Maple is that individuals are now becoming naturalized (meaning that they are growing from the seeds of planted trees rather than just growing in places where they’ve been planted) in greenspaces throughout Toronto. In turn, they are out-competing native species of trees and quickly replacing a mixed Sugar Maple-American Beech forest that would be the undisturbed normal here in the city of Toronto. Additionally, in comparison with that mixed Maple-Beech forest, Norway Maples shade-out most of the herb layer growing under its canopy. This loss, especially when Norway Maples grow in the ravine system of Toronto, leads to increased erosion. In short, while I dislike dichotomized concepts like native/non-native and invasive/non-invasive, these trees pose a serious ecological problem.

The City of Toronto, to their credit, have recognized the invasive nature of the Norway Maple and publish material describing it as an invasive species [pdf alert] including information on how to control it:

Norway Maple seedlings may be dug out of the ground.  Cut small saplings at the base using hand pruners or loppers. Small to medium sized trunks can be girdled.

But do we get the irony yet? The same department that publishes the brochure suggesting that Norway Maples are invasive and should be dug out of the ground, pruned or girdled is the same department now saying the Norway Maples found on city property cannot be tapped for sap.

The benefits of tapping Norway Maples outweigh the concerns. If tapping occurs using time-tested procedures ensuring that over-tapping does not occur¹ then there is little, if anything at risk for the health of the tree. There is, as NFFTT outlines, another benefit from this plan: the possibility of citizens’ engagement, understanding of and experience of our “urban forest”. Given that the City is already working to remove Norway Maples, why shouldn’t we find some benefit instead?

1. Simply, the proper number of taps is based on of the diameter of the tree, never to go beyond four per tree

I’ve posted this map to Flickr (the image above is hyperlinked to the original) where I’ve annotated locations to provide some context. Now, on this particular map, the brighter the white line, the more often I visited a particular location: this is my ten days of tracks made more transparent and superimposed over each other. So a brighter white isn’t a measure of duration (or time), just a measure of frequency.

For example, see Rondeau Road, which is the straight-ish north-south bright white line running down the middle of the peninsula (if this is unclear, now would be a good time to go visit the original). I drove into and out of the park along the road each day, so while I didn’t spend much time doing this, it is represented as a bright white due to the frequency over ten days that I travelled that portion of the park.

The next map that I created and uploaded to Flickr consists of the second kind of data that I collected: it is ten-days worth of my location, recorded every 30 seconds while I was outdoors.

This map shows a smaller scale to show the finer-grain data that was collected. The areas with the highest concentration of dots represent where I spent the most amount of time over the ten days. So, in comparison with the map above, Rondeau Road disappears. This is where the points get interesting, though. That big cluster in the upper-right corner of the map is a pond south of an area called the Pony Barns. Here’s why:

The only (known) male Prothonotary Warbler, pictured above, was visiting (living there, really) the pond during the days that I was collecting data. I went to find birders and to watch the Prothonotary myself. Here is an entry from my field journal from May 3rd:

Over lunch, it has started raining. I drive up the park road past the spicebush trail and over the pony barn. The wind has died down and the waves, that I had heard crashing against the lakeshore in the past days from here were quiet. With the rain, there was an earthy smell that permeated the air. I know that the prothonotary has been seen today and, given my visits over the past couple of days, I’m interested in seeing him again. As I arrive there is a gentleman there who, without asking what I’m there for says “He’s over there.” After which he says, “The prothonotary is there.” We chat for a while and exchange bird sightings.

So what?

I’m using the maps to try and show the kinds of places I (did and did not) visit and the relationship between the places visited and the birds seen. Because the travel wasn’t random. I was at Rondeau to find birders and to find birds: the maps show how some places have more “draw” and, as I’ve suggested with the Prothonotary anecdote above, the draw is often the chance to see certain species of birds.

More poetically, the amalgam of point offers a different kind of way of making sense of my time at Rondeau. It’s a visual representation of temporal and spatial information: at a glance the lines and points show more than just movement though space, they show a kind of detail about tempo and attention that would be difficult to record in other ways.

Inspired by others’ use of Twitter in higher ed, I decided to try and integrate Twitter into the course that I’ve developed and instructed while a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University.

First, a little about the course: ENVS 1010c is a first year course open to any major. As a result, the enrolment is about 100 students from a variety of academic experience and backgrounds. The content focuses on exploring the natural history of the Toronto and is designed to get students out of the classroom: as a consequence about half the classes are field trips. The other half of classes are lectures held in a typical raked, fixed-seating lecture hall.

The plan

I spent some time reflecting how I could use try and best use Twitter in this class. 140 characters is a limitation but also liberating: I didn’t feel like I could over-extend its reach¹ the first time through and it could be used as a compliment to regular classroom interactions rather than replacing them. Having read others’ experiences, also helped to narrow down what I didn’t want to do with it. I finally settled on introducing it as a kind of awareness tool. The example that I first gave students was that they could ask me questions while lecturing. Key here was that I was open to see how it evolved—and I told students so. I helped frame it by calling it “The Great Twitter Experiment of 2009″.

So, I included information on Twitter in the syllabus and introduced it in the first class. Here are the slides (.pptx alert!) that I used to introduce what Twitter was, what I wanted them to do, and some conventions. I had opened a new account—@TorontoNature—asked every student to sign up for a twitter account and then add their username to a wiki page I had set-up on the course’s Moodle site. I also let students know that they could protect their updates if they wanted to, that they were welcome to follow other students in the classroom. I let them know that they could tweet from their cell phones and get tweets from me sent to their cell phones via SMS². I tweeted. I asked them to send me a tweet as homework.

Blank Faces

Interestingly, as I introduced Twitter itself and how I hoped to use it, there were a surprising number of blank faces looking back at me and some vocal criticism of the plan.

“We can’t ask questions in the classroom anymore?” one student asked.

“No,” I assured them, “This is for people who might be uncomfortable with asking questions in a large classroom. If you want to put your hand up, I have no problem with that.”

“Will be marked on this?” asked another.

I hadn’t really thought about this. “Part of the evaluation is participation. If you participate using Twitter, I will take that into consideration when calculating your mark.”

“How can you know who we are when we could use any username?” a quick-thinking student replied.

Taking a moment I realized this is where the wiki came into play. “You’ll add your real name and username to the wiki, so I’ll keep track of you that way.”

The majority of students did not have a Twitter account. Those who had an account and active users were quick to come to my assistance in class and on-line, suggesting that students at least give it a try. At the end of the semester, TorontoNature had 72 followers. This means that, in hard numbers, with enrolment dropping to 92, I had about a 78% sign-up rate. Because I didn’t feel like there was a barn-burning adoption of Twitter, when I calculated participation, I didn’t use it as a criteria at all.

The set-up

I was lucky to have a two-projector set-up in the lecture hall. So, I projected a browser window on one screen and my lecture slides on the other. I asked students to add the #envs hashtag to anything they would post related to the course so we could all follow the conversation. I also asked the TAs to follow the #envs hashtag and draw my attention to anything that might come up. I planned, if uninterrupted by the TAs, to take a break while lecturing and see what had popped up with the #envs hashtag.

I also own an iPhone with a Twitter app (Echofon) that notifies me when someone @messages me. I didn’t introduce this explicitly in the first class, but it emerged as being important later in the course.

What emerged: the classroom

Students, over the course of the semester, did use twitter to ask questions, seek clarification and give feedback. Rather than waiting a few weeks or even to the end of the course to see how students were doing, I especially liked the instant-feedback I got. This meant that I changed my approach to reflecting on my teaching practice: rather than waiting to see feedback at the end of the course and deploy corrections for the next iteration of the course, I took the feedback and felt like I could be more nimble in deploying quick course corrections as the course was on-going.

I also used twitter as a kind of super-clicker. I could ask students a question that required more than selecting one of  four multiple choice answers. Now, students often chose to put their hands up to answer these questions, but some students answered these kinds of questions on twitter. It was also a great platform to provide further information based on classroom experiences.

The unanticipated emerged as well. I was lecturing about the difference between plants and trees and used the term “woody structures”. What would have likely been a snicker between friends became this, broadcast to the classroom on the projector: “size does matter when talking about woody structures”. Amusing and a joke I might have made in another setting. Rather than having a conniption fit, I just @replied to the student: “About woody structures…humorous, yes, but inappropriate.” So, in one sense, in reaction to the projected tweets, there were some examples of the “look at me, look what I can do” from students similar to the aping you see when people know they’re on television. But nothing too subversive and nothing that couldn’t be addressed using twitter itself. Which I liked.

What emerged: field trips

This was unexpected: given its mobile nature, and having an iPhone with a twitter client that let me know when I received @replies, student began tweeting me about field trips. In one sense, this was good as students who were truly lost could get a quick update from me. I was even able to provide the exact location where we were for a late-comer.

The downside to this is an extension of a a larger criticism that I hear from other course directors: students don’t read instructions. These tweets were asking the kind of questions that were already provided on the course website. So is it good to have a way for students to get in touch? I guess if they’re lost, regardless of whether or not they read the instructions, and having them participate is important, then helping them get them to the right place this isn’t a bad thing. At the same time, I’m sure there are course directors out there who would find this especially infuriating. It was disruptive, at times, to have a phone buzzing in my pocket.

What emerged: outside the classroom

Perhaps neatest was the tweet asking me if a tree that the student had seen on campus was a Tamarack. As far as learning goes, to have a student demonstrate the skills introduced in the classroom outside the classroom is a course director’s dream.

What would I tweak next time

• Take some more time to introduce Twitter. I would consider using some classroom time to book a computer lab (for 100 students though, so that could be a pipe dream) and get them there and then to sign up and learn the vernacular of @replies and #hashtags by doing it.
• Win students over on the idea of Twitter or, explain the different ways a student could use it in this particular setting. There’s nothing like past experience to tell sceptical students some of this year’s successes. I was missing that this year.
• Give TAs the responsibility to reply to tweets during field trips. No more buzzing pants while explaining why a tree is a Silver Maple.
• Consider not projecting a browser window to cut down on the “woody structure” type comments. This would mean TAs would have to manage the stream for me. But I also see it as a larger-world teachable moment, so I’m on the fence with this.
• Institute a specific way for student to interact with course material using Twitter. My current idea is to have student look for related websites or news articles, tweet a summary and provide a bit.ly link. Sort of like what I was doing with this tweet.

In summary

I discovered that there wasn’t one right way to use Twitter in the classroom. I like this. For me, in ENVS 1010c, the best uses of Twitter in the classroom emerged over the course of the semester through its use. My idea of a safer way of asking questions in class morphed into a bunch of different things:

• a vehicle for immediate feedback, from student to instructor and instructor to students
• a chance for (mild) student subversiveness
• a mobile solution that allowed students to:
  • get last-minute (even geo-tagged) updates about the course
  • continue the learning process outside the classroom and still get feedback from me
• and, a way for students uncomfortable with speaking in a class of 100, to have voice

So while I didn’t create a community of 72 student like I see between some of the Twitter contacts that I have, my experiment was anything but a failure. I have yet to see formal evaluations of ENVS 1010c to see if there was a strong positive or negative reactions. But here Twitter offers another possibility: I’ll try tweeting on the TorontoNature account to get feedback and see if anyone replies.

Who knows, I might have created a different kind of classroom community…

Update (February 19, 3:36pm): Here are students’ replies to my tweet for feedback: One, two, three

1. In the way that technology is implemented and its use is integral to the success of of some part of the classroom experience—like counting clicker use as participation. I didn’t want to set Twitter up only to have it fail miserably.
2. This is an aspect about Twitter that I really like—it has a low technology barrier for entry. You are not asking students to buy another one-use piece of technology. If they have laptops with them, they can tweet there. If they don’t bring laptops to class, they can use their cell phones.

That’s a Palm Tungsten T2, a Palm Wireless Keyboard and a C Pen C600 hand held scanner. The technologies that connect them to my computer are all obsolete, yet I miss the functionality this suite provided and don’t have a comparable system in use today.

Here’s how I used them: When I was reading, I had the C Pen at hand and rather than highlighting with a fluorescent maker, I would simply scan the line or lines of text into the scanner. I would also scan the page number that the text appeared. Once I was done reading the article or book, I could attach the C600 to the computer. I would upload these text notes, open them in Word, edit them where typos occurred and then save the document. With that saved, the scanned text became searchable using Copernic Desktop Search—and it was a great system, in part, because all you needed to remember was an idea or concept. Enter that into Copernic and up would pop all the papers and books that they appeared in. Choose a suitable quote, copy and paste it into a document and you were done. In a sense, I could almost forget the specifics of what I had read; just needing to remember that idea and then searching for that. No hunting and pecking through a book. Super time-saver.

I would also be keeping types notes of reflections on the T2—using the keyboard and Documents to Go, I would create a new file for each document and enter thoughts or ideas as I read them. Sync the document to the computer and I had a digital version that was available for searching. I also used the T2 for taking notes in class and at conferences. Again, all digital documents.

Here’s the lament. It’s not the objects that are broken in the system: I can still pop in fresh batteries and these three still work. It’s the software and interface hardware that left me behind. The C Pen connected to my computer via serial port. The serial port has long been replaced by USB (I even purchased a serial to USB adaptor to lengthen the life of the scanner. After a fresh install of XP, the adaptor stopped working because I misplaced the CD-ROM with the drivers). On the software side of things is the fact that from Vista forward, the software that C Pen needed to sync was not compatible. Similar story with the Palm T2. Now, perhaps I could jury-rig a solution involving dual-booting OSes and sussing out proper drivers. But I’m not that interested. And I feel like I shouldn’t have to.

So, in the end, I’m going to send these three off to be recycled. And where am I left now? I can still edit documents using Docs to Go on my iPhone. Sadly, with no external keyboard I’m limited to quick edits. I could start to photograph pages and then have the text recognized by OCR software, but it’s not nearly as fine-grain a solution as line by line scanning.

Long-ish story short, I now have spiral bound notebooks with hand-written reflections & quotes. Not so digital, but they don’t get left behind.

The start of the Skunk Cabbage, originally uploaded by Gavatron.

A sure sign of spring is the emergence of Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). While walking the dogs in the Nordheimer Ravine today, I noticed some cabbage is beginning its 2010 growing season. This is the earliest that I’ve noticed the Cabbage in this location, but it’s also the earliest that I’ve gone looking for it.

This photograph (right), taken in the same spot in 2008, show what the flower will look like in early March.

photo credit: auburnxc

Instead of protest, culture jamming, confrontation, and direct action the environmental sporting practices of traveling the state by automobile and competitively searching for vast numbers of birds is what the World Series of Birding constructs as environmentalist. Driving in search of birds in polluted New Jersey is, in this formulation, a great way to protect birds. (p.214)

This is how author Spencer Schaffner, writing in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, condemns the World Series of Birding as more sport than a form of environmental conservation. In this paper, Schaffner links birding to toxic waste writing that “birders often seek out polluted environmental niches” (p. 212) and rather than confronting the tension of our culture’s creation of the waste, the sport acts to hide or ignore it. Given my research, I don’t agree outright that birders actively seek out polluted areas and this is where I’m less impressed with the paper.

Birding and bird conservation

Returning, however, to this idea that birding is not the same as bird conservation, Schaffner writes:

The brand of environmentalism promoted by mainstream environmental organizations is made in ways palatable, conservative, and legitimate through a relationship with the accepted sport practice of birding. Unlike the growing environmental movement to end global warming, for instance, which threatens to radically change entrenched aspects of industrial capitalism, protecting wild birds has only involved relatively undisruptive changes such as the establishment of trade and hunting laws, small-scale nature preserves, and pesticide regulation. (p. 212)

And this is what I want to discuss in this post: I have yet to see a cogent reply from the birding community to address this critique. In fact, its an argument that could be made from my own work: when asking birders what kind of rules they follow when out watching birds, I was amazed at the human-centred (avoid trespassing on private property, follow the rules of the road when birding in a car) or instrumental (don’t drop trash) nature of the responses. True, there were thoughtful multicentric-centred responses, but when birds were mentioned in most birder’s ethical approach to birding, it is often along the lines of this participant’s response:

I don’t want to try and get too close, but I will approach one quietly and sort of let the bird – their instinct for self-preservation, you know, rule that. If you make too much noise, it’s just going to fly away.  But I don’t want to disturb the bird.  I want to get a good look at it but beyond that some move away.

Getting that good look is still at the heart of the activity with little self-regulation or questioning about what might be in the best interest for the bird. In this case, the birder is leaving it to the bird to make the decision that he’s too close—by flying away. While this may not be the practice of everyone, I have seen enough similar behaviour to this (which I call “birders behaving badly”) that I know its not an isolated practice.

Birding as sport or birding as conservation

Which returns us to the larger question that Schaffner raises: is birding an act of leisure (sport) or is it an act of conservation? And if it is more than leisure, how does the birding community address critiques that birding is an activity that does little more than promoting the status quo—appearances as an activity that appears to be doing little to address larger environmental concerns or, as I suggest, the personal well-being of birds watched?

I know that birders feel when they participate in citizen science programs (such as the Christmas Bird Count) that they are participating in the monitoring and conservation of bird populations. I know that birders feel that when they join a group (such as Field Naturalists) that purchases and protects habitat for birds that they are participating in habitat conservation. What is enough?

It is clear that people don’t like to hear that what they are currently doing isn’t enough—we all like to feel like we’re competent and illuminated. It is also clear that bird populations are continuing to decrease. We know this, ironically, through bird population monitoring. What I think articles like Schaffner’s raise is that uncomfortable feeling, an inner psychological state of angst, that what we do in the name of birds, on the whole, isn’t enough. There are at least two responses: dismiss these claims outright (as I heard from birders as the paper was published) or reflect on the larger claims of the paper and make an effort to do a bit more.

And in my research, I’ve heard from birders who are starting to make connections between their larger lives and the act of birding. Take this conversation, for example:

Gavan: Would you say that, or do you have any examples of times where you have made – whether you have made behavioural changes or even purchasing changes based on the lives of birds?

Male: Absolutely.

Gavan: Can you explain to me maybe some of those things?

Male: I read Bridget Stuchbury’s book [Silence Of The Songbirds].

Female: It’s a book at our Nature Club.

Male: Also, we are much more conscious of where a product comes from now. For example, we’re a little more sensitive about buying products in the winter that comes from South Americas. We worry about the practices.

I have even thought – I mean I haven’t acted on this, but I have thought of going up to the produce manager of the local supermarket and say “I’m not going to buy these asparagus from Peru because I don’t know what’s on it, for one, and I don’t know if there’s something on it, what impact that has had on something that I care about, birds.” So I have not done that, but it has crossed my mind, I should. I probably don’t do it because I’m generally not a confrontational and I just figure he’s going to look at me and say “what’s this jerk talking about anyway”.

It’s not a question of knowledge, it’s a question of action. And the risk of looking like a jerk.