Three Ways of Looking: A Multidisciplinary Experience

I grew up thinking of myself strictly as a humanities student. I didn’t like the rigidity of math and the endless details of science bored me. The emotional intelligence that was required to understand the nuances of a novel seemed to have no place in STEM, so I kept the two fields separate. I decided I would mostly leave the science and numbers to the people that enjoyed it, and they would leave the theater and writing to people like me. I signed up for this class on a whim, needing to fill a spot in my schedule and intrigued by the colored pencils and tiny magnifying glass we would receive in our field kit. However, by accessing my spot through three ways of looking, I’ve come away with a much deeper understanding of science as an interdisciplinary experience.

I grew up in a place without seasons, so I couldn’t comprehend about how drastic the change would be from August to November. On my first trip out to my spot, the dense green forests and the fauna living in them provided noise and shade. But when the leaves turned brown and fell, the forests went quiet and the only sound was the occasional rush of a truck passing by on the highway just down the hill. Light penetrated through the naked branches, and I could now see the house that was up the hill about 1000 feet away through the skinny tree trunks. Over 10 weeks, the environment had completely changed.

The way nature is referenced in literature and popular is very one-sided: Nature is an escape. Wilderness must be conquered. Mountains are strong and lasting compared to the fragility of human beings. As Jane Austen famously writes in Pride and Prejudice, “What are men to mountains and rocks?”

When we go into the woods we don’t often think about how this place we have escaped to is changing around us. But nature is always evolving, even on a small scale. Over the course of the semester, sediment was deposited on the bank that wasn’t there before. The leaves fell en masse, adding rich material to the forest floor to be recycled in the spring. The rocks in the stream were smoothed and eroded and carried downstream to be deposited somewhere else. The speed with which nature evolved was fast and intentional as if each leaf and rock knew how to respond. This experience was emotional; the steady and inevitable changes that I noticed on each visit grounded me. The persistent marching forward of the natural world made me aware of each minute I was wasting on my phone or in my dorm room. The discovery of crayfish in the stream helped me realize how much I might be missing by not poking under more metaphorical rocks. I was humbled by the realization that the natural world did not wait for me or even care that I was there; It was going to evolve, whether or not I observed it. This was the first way my relationship with this spot grew. This was my first way of looking.

The weeks I spent at Kenyon are nothing compared to the billions of years of change that the earth has endured. The violent mounting building events and erosion and deposition that have contributed to the land is happening as we speak but on a much larger time scale. The magnitude of this time scale is difficult for us to understand, but if the entire history of planet earth happened in 24 hours, humans would only exist in the last one second. There are billions of years of geologic history, and the rocks under our feet give us the clues to understand portions of it. The Black Hand sandstone that makes up Ohio’s bedrock is made from the erosion of the Appalachian mountains from the Paleozoic era, between 500 and 300 million years ago. Today's Appalachian mountains that stretch across most of the eastern United States have been forced up by large collisions of land three times, then eroded down to almost nothing. The plates of the earth are constantly in motion, pulling apart from each other and realigning, forcing up mountains and melting rock under subduction zones.

With every single grain of sand, every rock in the stream, there are billions of years of history dictating why it is there. All I needed to do to enlighten myself was to ask the right questions. For example, why is the land around Kenyon covered in hills, while Oberlin is flat? Referring to graphs we received in class showing the altitudes of Ohio and what I read in Written in Stone allowed me hypothesize that Oberlin’s topography is due to the receding of the Laurentide ice sheet. This glacial movement flattened out the land in what is now Lorain County and melted to form Lake Erie. While Knox County’s topography is also due to glaciation, this happened in the Illinoian period, scraping out hillsides and valleys and depositing sediment to create the surface we see today. This purely scientific approach is more traditional and extremely valuable. By accessing my spot in this way, I was able to learn a lot about my environment and apply it more broadly to the Eastern United States, enhancing my learning. Understanding my spot through science was my second way of looking.

Compared to the billions of years of geologic history, the time humans have spent on earth seems unimportant, but the land in Knox county is rich with native history. Land recognitions have become more normal in recent years to acknowledge the land settlers stole from the indigenous people. I believe it is important to understand the people’s history of the land we are on, especially if we are looking to gain scientific knowledge from it.

The indigenous people, the Delawares, were the sole occupants of Knox County until 1795 when the Fort McIntosh treaty of 1785 was reestablished. One of the most important facets of native land management was prescribed burning, and hundreds of years of this treatment led to the development of Ohio’s prairies and Oak dominated forests. In Reading the Forested Landscape, Tom Wessels quotes Thomas Morton, a New England explorer from 1632, writing, “The salvages are accustomed to set fire to the Country, in all places where they come; and to burne it, twize a yeare, vixe at the Springe, and at the fall of the leafe. The reason the mooves them to do so, is because it would be so overgrown with underweeds, that it would be all a copice wood, and the people would not be able to passe through the Country out of a beaten path.” The history of this group of people is essential to understanding the history of the land I was exploring because our benefit from the land is due to their management of it for so long. This knowledge helped me pose important questions about Kenyon’s right to the land I was on. This was my third way of looking.

Science and emotion are not at odds but enhance the other. I could have chosen to become acquainted with my spot just through my feelings, through the notes I made about how uncomfortable my pants were on a certain day, and how lucky I felt to be in such a beautiful environment for the next four years. I could have taken all feeling out of it and just thought about classifying the trees that stood above my head, or how the bedrock under my feet got there, or study the grade of the hill that Kenyon sits atop. Or I could have approached the land purely through our species history, learning how the indigenous people of Ohio managed the land before the settlement of Europeans in 1795. My previous thinking, or rather, the binary that my education had forced me into, made me feel like different people were designed to take these different approaches separately. But that isn’t true. Kimmerer explores this idea in Braiding Sweetgrass, concluding, “Science and traditional knowledge may ask different questions and speak different languages, but they may converge when both truly listen to the plants.” My three ways of looking taught me that a broad and multidisciplinary understanding of an area is the most rewarding way to access an environment. Just as feeling needs science, science needs feeling.

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