While the system shown on the left was not drawn by me, it is very reminiscent of a drawing, now lost unfortunately, of the first lecture I ever gave. Ask Rod McKenzie at USC. He will remember (and he saved me on that first outing in front of a class. Thank you again Rod!) I have always thought in the circular pattern, but didn't have a term to describe how I thought. Only slowly, after many years of study, did I finally come to the conclusion that the way I thought naturally was as a systems thinker. Knowing that now, makes a lot of the difficult past easier for me to understand. I just never got the Band Aid way that I saw the world applying "answers" to their problems. but since working on my book I have had to work out the many problems that were mine, and those that were part of the paradigm I was never able to accept. Maybe my mother will finally begin to understand why I was such a difficult adolescent (and adult).
Sustainability and so much of what I have written about in this blog over the years has been about bringing us along to do things tangibly sustainable. Grow good food, drive smart cars or ride your bike!, conserve energy, but in my classes things have been changing. I wasn't even aware of it until a couple of years ago when I realized that everything I saw now was through the eyes of the sustainable mindset. All my classes were geared to looking at the world with humans as part of nature (not apart as my students have now realized) and that everything is connected. certainly my students, if nothing else, get a strong dose of the interconnectivity of it all. But if that is all they learn (and I think there is much more) it is the best thing they will EVER learn.
This all brings me back to why I ended up as a geographer (even though I was explicitly told I was not one, but a philosopher - which I am guilty of, but as a geographer). I was drawn to geography because in it I saw the ability to bridge the disciplines. Art, humanities, science are all a part of what makes geography my chosen world. And a regional geographer at that, something that is certainly not popular amongst the current stream of geography, but so be it. I am just an old-fashioned geographer, with a twist. As Nevin Fenneman said long ago (1919)
...the one thing that is first, last, and always geography and nothing else, is the study of areas in their compositeness or complexity, that is regional geography.
To me the perfect life is one where I gain the knowledge, experience, and background within all the regions (or bioregions, but that is another subject) we can know. By doing that we begin to know place and that tender feeling of "sense of place." We see the complex patina formed when humans work within the ecosystems and the physical world. When that happens it gets exciting and one can begin to see the fractal relations of one region to another, they patches that don't fit, but do, and the world does become as one.
All right, calm down now Chris. That's enough to get you feeding on that high that cannot be named.
