Urban Nature Writing?

I wasn't looking to get inspired by my homework tonight, considering the queue of remaining assignments, but I did.

On the first day of Intro to Environmental Studies, the professors asked the students to tell the class about their favorite place. I didn't raise my hand: The favorite places were all in the "wilderness" somewhere, and at the time I was severely and pleasantly lost in my webfic addiction. My favorite place is Salt Lake City. This is where I became myself, crawled out of the darkness that was my life in high school, stuck in a box-shaped room in the suburbs with nothing but my computer screen and my hallucinations for guidance.

Oh, and a melodramatic teenage depression.

But no matter that my love for this place arose from my coming of age (and increased through familiarity, of course)--it's still a deep, raw affection, sometimes even a need, a sense of home--"home is where the heart is," but my loved ones live far from where I feel most at home. Home is where the self grows strongest.

My class readings for the day have validated my attachment to an urban setting: two readings discussed urban ecology, urged that we consider cities as ecosystems, not malign them as inferior antitheses of nature; the other reading discussed nature writers.

Nature writers, Trimble claims, listen to their subject, acknowledge it as the authority instead of identifying themselves as experts.

What would it be like to observe Salt Lake in this way?

The cars come first to my mind. They are the loudest, and the most visibly numerous agents in the city. The buildings and roads, more invisible to a human observer, perhaps deserve first mention. The changes in the contours of the earth wrought by construction, like the compacted terrace my house sits on, overlooking 13th East, which corresponds, I've heard, to a fault line.

The animal life. The rodents scurrying in scraps of woods around Emigration Creek on Westminster campus, or in the native plants and imported rocks of a xeriscaped yard. One crawled into my house a week or so ago; I saw it in several places over the course of the day, haven't seen it since. I hope for its sake it didn't fall prey to my roommate's neurotoxin trap, and part of me resents my failure to replace the poison with humane traps. Maybe I will talk to my roommate about that.

Spiders are more common indoor companions, and on the campus, box elder bugs. There must be an astonishing array of smaller life forms that I don't notice.

Invasive and nonnative species fascinate me. They thrive in the urban landscape--does that give them the right to colonize it? A fellow student in class thinks so, that the disturbances of modern human society will lead to a new equilibrium, another step in the course of evolution.

Of course the loss in the meantime may be devastating, the cost too high. I don't know the science to inform this normative question.

The weather, of course, is a major part of our ecosystem. In the past week we went from shining snow cover for several days to warmth and rain scattered with hail today. This effects the transportation patterns of the human and vehicle populations of the city: I was among the few bikers in the hail, although many have adapted to the snow--and even the inversion. I passed a fellow cyclist who wore a breath mask. I think I may adopt this innovation.

The internet itself is an interesting device: I can use it to find the experiences of other cities, geographically arbitrarily far away, with the innovation I'm considering. They can ship me the product if I find out other people consider it useful.

The light--including the light pollution--is among the most striking features of this city. City light on clouds at night. Stars drowned out. Dusky light caught between snow and cloud cover, the in-between world surreally bright and edged in orange-blue.

In Sustainability & Consciousness last semester, we talked about "going out into the woods alone"--and how unbearably lonely the first few days could be. Yet I ghost through the city, often going many days without a meaningful or prolonged conversation. It wears on me, especially when (as today) I've had contact with another person, the contrast showing up the loneliness. Solitude is not a requisite condition for nature writing or observation: some of the famous nature writers traveled with geologists or biologists to give their journeys direction and information. But solitude is a common condition. I wonder if I can turn mine into observation as well.

Possible success paper?

One of the things I am not that great at that I would expect someone of my education level to be better at: Writing papers.

In the past few weeks I've found myself shutting down and acting oddly from the stress of having to write a 10-page paper using high-quality sources for Environmental Politics and Policy. I submitted a last-minute research proposal last Thursday and instantly felt relieved, but I was sick again today from the prospect of meeting with my professor. In addition to the fears I already had about completing the paper, I thought ze would be harsh on my initial effort. Instead, ze gave me a list of sources to look up following a possible focus for my paper: the legislative history of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the innovative tradeable sulfur allowances.

This is quite possibly the most positive academic mentoring experience I have ever had. Which, retrospectively, is probably sad, but I'm stoked. Now I think this professor rocks.

I'm telling myself that I now know how to deal with the anxiety: Do the work. I'm so glad I have a direction to go in, and I'll probably be posting my progress and setbacks on this blog.

Crossed fingers. This could be a major breakthrough in my academic career.

Mental Growing Pangs

This summer, I took an intro to ethics class. The sole paper I wrote for that class was on assisted suicide. Since I had been suicidal from depression for many months in the prior year and since the belief that living probably isn't really worth it hadn't gone away (and is still with me in several forms), the arguments against suicide challenged me and opened my eyes.

The death of a college professor who wrote often about suicide, didn't seem depressed, but took zir own life at a certain age--"rational suicide" to avoid the toll of terminal illness--was attributed by some to "rigid thinking," the inability to see or take seriously alternative solutions to a problem or interpretations of reality.

Lately I've found myself metaphorically and literally blinking in confusion at life as my own patterns of "rigid thinking" temporarily subside. I would like to truly be open to new ideas.

I never saw myself as someone who was not able to think outside my preconceived notions before, but in retrospect I have found it very difficult to accept uncertainty or contradictory information or lines of thinking. In high school, I struggled with my own misogyny, and later I struggled to find a new identity after realizing that conservatism wasn't the white-knight ideology I had thought it was.

During my first year of college, I agonized endlessly over my choice to call my gender identity "androgyne"--even though I adopted that label almost as soon as I first considered transgendered people, assimilating new information and new conceptual structures felt threatening, like it invalidated me as a person to realize that other people might disagree with the basis for my self-labeling or choose to see gender in a different way.

After that year, I strangely dropped the label. I still call myself genderqueer occasionally, but I wanted to be seen as a cisgendered person. I didn't change my grooming habits to become gender normative, but I didn't and don't talk much about gender identity, and I also refer to myself in thought and word--honestly--as my biological gender. Not long ago I felt disoriented at the shape of my own body for a week or so, but that's rare.

I still think that, if I have a gender identity, it's definitely not plain cis, but how many standard deviations does that put me away from the average person? Less than one? More than two? I have no way of telling, and that's okay with me. There are cultural conceptual problems with gender, and I have no desire to stake out territory and argue about what's real, what's innate, what's imagined, what's culturally instilled, what's changeable.

Instead, I accept people's concepts of their own experience of gender as valid, and I reject generalizations about "men" or "women" or other gender-related categories. I'm not very vocal about it, but that's probably more related to self-confidence than anything else.

Rigid thinking relates complexly to self-confidence. On the one hand, it can lead to pigheaded brashness. On the other, awareness of that flaw gives me reason to doubt myself, and the rigid thinking itself makes it hard to learn and grow.

This largely explains my current impulse to write more. I think better when I write. I'm more likely to realize when my ideas hold no water, or to follow a promising line of thought further along. It helps me connect with my own past thoughts and experiences instead of floating in vague ideas about myself that don't turn out to be true upon further inspection.