Bluebird Day: The Art of Noticing

Happy autumn, everyone! Here is a piece of writing from the LANDS Field Semester that I'm currently in.

The first week of readings brought up both familiar and foreign concepts to me. As I reflect on my incredible and fulfilling summer experiences working on a snorkel field crew in Idaho, I find myself thinking a lot about my group’s dynamics, and how magical it was to spend time living fully in the present, enjoying the outdoors. I am hopeful that my fall experience with LANDS will continue along that vein; I feel ready to absorb and engage, and gain as much as possible.

I really enjoyed rereading Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic”. I think that I have read it for several different classes, but it’s amazing how quickly some ideas can fade or be forgotten in order to absorb new information. Leopold writes “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value” (6). I found this passage helpful in my efforts to mentally transition for summer work mode to school and to Burlington. My summer experiences taught me to appreciate the rivers, the time I shared with my crewmembers, and hard physical labor, the kind that made my eyes shut so easily and gratefully at the end of each day. I feel fortunate that I have had so many experiences to go outdoors and actually have the time and resources to notice stones, butterflies, bugs, riffles and pools, and flowers—I treasure my time outdoors with all of my heart, because it never fails to bring me pure tranquility and happiness. But it got me thinking about people who haven’t been in the circumstances to have such treasured memories outdoors—do they share the same appreciation for little details of nature as I do, or not? Can a person who has only ever known the concrete sidewalks and buildings of the inner city see the beauty and value in a single wildflower, the sight of open spaces and the joy it can bring to the human heart, or even the bittersweet changing of the seasons? Do these people appreciate nature more, because they have such limited access to it, or less, because they simply haven’t had much exposure? These are questions that I’m currently grappling with, and an answer that I’ve come up (based on my current thoughts, which are of course subject to change and improvement) is that it really is based on each person’s individualized experience. I can’t put a monetary value on seeing an adult Chinook salmon for the first time, or the taste of a ripe wild blackberry, or the feeling of mud dried on my legs after a hard day of hiking to snorkel sites. In “The Land Ethic”, Leopold articulates the importance of creating a land conservation system that incorporates these “priceless” values—values that do not have economic value but hold memories, peace, health benefits, and joy.

In my mind, attempting to understand values that do not have a specific label is also connected to group dynamics. The introduction of the “This American Life” piece spurred me to think about making sure that I put effort into connecting with my LANDS peers and professors. During my summer work, I found that the best way to connect with my crew leader and fellow crewmembers was to do two things: listen, and practice empathy. When I listened to their stories and their ideas, I began to realize that it was not always necessary to completely understand as much as it was to put effort into trying. As I look ahead to the LANDS semester, I think it will be important to maintain a positive, supportive attitude so that our team can accomplish our work with excellence and efficiency, and we can fuel ourselves with a cheerful momentum. In creating a land ethic and in group dynamics, it seems more important to recognize and value the process and value in both the individual and the system in the detail: having an end result is meaningful, but the journey or the process should not be overlooked.