Author Archives: Joseph Ritter

USA

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Reading Diary of a Citizen Scientist I am constantly struck at simply how vast the landscape of the United States is. I know it may sound elementary, but it is hard for me, from New Jersey, to really ever imagine a rainfall that would lead people to begin evacuating a town, as Russell explains. Having never been out west, the stories from people who have gone there from my area are practically all the same: you have to go there, its so grand, its so different.

I think we are lucky to live in the United States because of its size and different topography, landscapes, and composition from sea to sea. There is so much to see and experience that you could probably feel like you indeed were in a different country depending on how far away from home you were. I am an East Coast creature; I’ve been to every state on the Atlantic coastline and I spend most of my time in Massachusetts and New Jersey, so I have yet to have that epiphany moment where I feel as if I have left the boundaries of our nation, but I cannot wait for that day. This is why I am enjoying reading Citizen Scientist, not so much for the description of tiger beetles, but because of the description of places that are out there, in our country, waiting to be visited, studied, and enjoyed. I could never imagine having an irrigation ditch near my house, but as the author explains, that is simply commonplace where she is from. What a vast country we live in.

Questions

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Yesterday we had the great opportunity to get out on the water and make our way down the Delaware. I can certainly say that as we got out of the vans, into our kayaks, and finally back to campus, my mindset evolved over the course of the day. Questions like “how hard am I going to have to paddle?”, “why am I up so early?”, and “Do I really have to get my shoes dirty?” were dominating my psyche early; although I was excited for the trip, I had to prepare myself for the true hands-on nature of the activities. But these questions did not linger long in my head, as being on the water often takes my mind to much simpler, elemental places. I began asking myself questions such as “What’s causing that disturbance in the water?”, and “Are the cormorants looking to feed?”.

Your attention is always required when you’re in the water, and it was nice to be able to solely focus on the task at hand yesterday: getting my kayak down the river with, hopefully, me still in it. Questions regarding school work and social life turned into questions regarding paddle strokes, angles into rapids, and wildlife moving around us. I think it would be easy to say that the river distracted me from other obligations for the time, but I feel that classification is a disservice to the river. Rather, I would say that the river reestablished what was important to me at that moment, the elemental nature of life, and oriented my thoughts away from superficial distractions that can easily be mistaken for the building blocks of life. What a nice way to spend a Saturday.

Phone Off For More Connection

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Matt Ritchel’s piece regarding the camping trip undertaken to explain media connectedness reminded me of the evolution of an area that I spend a majority of my time, and how it has changed based on cell phone connectivity.

Aquinnah, Martha’s Vineyard, is home to some of the most desolate beaches and clearest night skies I have ever known. A fisherman, I would go out to the beach with my father in hopes of catching striped bass and bluefish under the cover of darkness, when the fish feed and the light is low. The scene is hard to describe to this day; the calm crashes of the waves, the moon and the stars providing all of the illumination that is needed, the occasional splash indicating someone had hooked into a fish. The most beautiful thing was that there was no cell service, allowing for more focus on the fishing, the stars, and the place itself. Fishermen would pass the slack tides by stargazing, talking with one another, and walking the beach. Comparing intelligence on where the fish were around the island is a pastime of the Vineyard fisherman, and people shared in their success with others. But, times change.

Today, cell phone service has been extended to Aquinnah, as more and more houses have come up and wanted cell towers around their residences. This has completely changed the environment, and even the activities of the people who are there. The most beautiful pictures nature can offer human, the clear night sky, is ignored in favor of checking email, social networks, and calling friends to pass the time between fish strikes. As Ritchel explains in his piece, phones can even be used as a means to be purposefully antisocial, and this is certainly the case amongst the new guard of fishermen, as conversations regarding any life topic have been exchanged for the self-imposed solitude that people are placing on themselves when they engage their phones.

I am fortunate enough to spend large amounts of the year on Martha’s Vineyard, but I can never understand when I meet people who are there for the first time or are only there for a few days out fishing who are staring at their phones. It seems to me that the regulars, the locals, the experienced are those who leave their phones behind, rather than those who are experiencing this beautiful terrain for the first time. Perhaps it takes a connection with nature and beauty to have one later on.

Outside Lies Magic Reading

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Author John R. Stilgoe offers an interesting interpretation of the outside world early on in the text when he asserts, “The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in” (2). While I understand the evolution of ecosystems depending on the inhabitants, the notion of nature being modified by humans, yet still being natural, is one that I believe has varying degrees. Just how much is something in its natural state, is it wild, if it has been modified or impacted by humans at some point in time? Do nature and natural mean the same thing, or are they also different levels of a scale that balances between how much a portion of the Earth has been used or developed by humankind?

This idea of varying degrees of nature due to human interaction was one that was prevalent during our walk through campus on the first day of class. Was the garden planted by the students in front of our building as natural as the woods that border our campus that are too steep to build on, or is one more natural than the other, a better emulation of nature than its counterpart? I believe that the woods are a stronger representation of nature than the garden was because of its lack of modification by man; with human interaction comes artificial results, and the natural evolution of the woods was less interrupted or tainted by the footprint of man.

Through my sliding scale definition of nature and natural, the question certainly can be asked: are nature and natural things a finite resource, and can they ever be regenerated if human interaction was the means of original degeneration? I do not know the answer to that; but I certainly hope that over course of this semester, some light is shed on the matter.