Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:18 pm Post subject: Snow day fun
OK friends, I hope you're tucked in warmly and well. Here's the assignment:
You are going to do a dialectical notebook, but with slightly modified instructions...
Materials:
A sheet of notebook paper
A pen or pencil
Your final project questions
Your Environmental History text
Your computer (to post on the forum)
A timekeeping device
Set up for a dialectical notebook, but you'll only do columns one and two on paper, so you only need one sheet of notebook paper, folded in half the long way.
1. For column 1, pick one of your questions from your final project
2. In column 2, free write about your question. Write for 7-10 minutes.
3. Instead of writing column three on notebook paper, you'll write it on the forum. This 1st post will bring one piece we've read (or a chunk that you select from any piece we've read) for this class into the thinking you did in column 2. Hence, in column three, you'll need to be clear about which of your questions you chose and some of your thinking on it, but also free write on the mash-up of your thinking and that of one of the authors we've read. Please write for 10-15 minutes.
4. Column 4 will also happen on the forum, where you will respond/add-in/challenge the post of one of your classmates. Please try to wait at least an hour between the time you do your 1st and second post. Feel free to bring your own ideas and/or those of another author or historian into the mix. Please write for 15-20 minutes.
5. This step is optional, but I'd love it if you'd either respond to what someone wrote about your post, or if you responded to another post. I know that 3 posts are a lot, so only do it if you feel up to it. Rock on.
I chose my question about leash laws in Newton and in the park itself. I found myself relating it to the reading we did, The Trouble with Wilderness by William Cronan about national parks. I think Cold Spring Park has a similar issue, only on a much smaller scale then say Yellowstone. First of all, Cold spring park is definately not natural. It used to be a dump, then was transformed into anature walk with exercise stations and sports fields. However, many of the neighbors of the park against any off leash areas are also against bikers going through the trails or joggers even, as if they want the park to betheir own natural piece of wilderness-even though nothing about it is wild.
since it looks like I am the first to post, I will post a reply once someone else posts
1. Mount Auburn was built at a time before access to cars was common for middle and lower class people and transportation to the “country” was difficult. Mount Auburn did not even allow cars to enter the cemetery until 1908, prior to that only people who had burial plots inside could enter with a carriage and horses were not allowed. Did this affect the type of people who came to Mount Auburn in the 19th century and if so how did it change the clientele of the cemetery?
I chose this question about who gets to experience the naturalism of Mount Auburn, because I thought it related well to this idea we’ve been talking about this entire course about who gets to experience “nature”. I thought the best reading to back this up with is the Chaplin reading who argues about the Europeans though of how the Indians were the “unnatural inhabitants” of America and the Europeans were actually the ones who were meant to be there. Is it only people with access to cars and in a higher class that can experience the beauty of this national park? Mount Auburn is indeed completely open to anyone who wants to be there but if the only people that can afford to go there are Harvard students, Boston Brahmins and other wealthier people, is it truly open to anyone? This might be another example of “natural” inhabitants of Mount Auburn and “unnatural” inhabitants.
This also goes along with the other national parks readings we’ve done and how some people can experience the wilderness and others cant. Does this mean Mount Auburn should actually have been in the city so that everyone can experience it? For many Mount Auburn was (and still is) the closest thing to woods or nature that one can get living in Boston. The whole point of Mount Auburn was that it was removed from the city and in a place of tranquility and quietness, but that means that not everyone can visit it.
The question i chose to analyze from my project was, "The constructions of new buildings have been affected by the location of the small amount of present wetlands. The wetlands cannot simply be moved so they must be either destroyed or worked around. 1) Why is there such a need for the present wildlife, specifically the small amount of wetlands? 2) Why doesn’t the school just remove this small, insufficient part of nature to benefit themselves, as they have done in the past?"
These two questions bonded well together so i thought i would put them together. i was interested in these questions because it came up a lot in our class. I think this mentality that humans can erase nature in an instant for self gain was a major theme in the Environment History course. The reading i can most relate this to is the Cathedral Pines reading. The reading describes the controversy of wether to tear down an old forest that had been devastated by a hurricane. Because it was an eyesore, would they be just in completely removing the park? As i did research for my project, i noticed that the wetlands that were causing such a problems for the construction companies, were not maintained well. They had become a dump of some sorts. The school never decided to just remove the wetlands because they thought it was an important part of the ecosystem of the campus but yet never maintained it and kept it clean.
The question I chose was “How did resentment towards the land influence assimilation?”
My relatives, as well as many other Irish immigrants in the mid 1800’s, moved to cities, where they worked in factories, on construction sites, or in mills. Since the land had, in a sense betrayed them, they built lives for themselves where they were not dependent on the land, they could take could provide for themselves without depending on the land (in the most natural sense).
One piece that shares similar themes was “A Hideous and Desolate Wilderness”. Although the problems Bradford has with nature/the environment he lives in were different than the problems my relatives/many Irish people had with the environment during the potato blight, the idea that nature can be an antagonistic force is similar. Bradford describes being subject to “sharp and violent” winters, and struggles to survive and be satisfied with the environment he is in. Bradford writes, “When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul was overwhelmed”. For people in Ireland during the famine starvation was not the only issue. Poverty, homelessness, and being subject to oppression all were a part of it too. Those problems were (for the most part) caused by the land as well. “A Hideous and Desolate Wilderness” explores the strife nature caused the author, which is similar to the strife nature caused people during the famine, which influenced their actions in America.
"Is the image of Elm Bank an expectation held by surrounding community members? If large and impressive buildings are maintained more than trails, is the impression the public gets more important than nature?"
A little of my thinking on this from column two was realizing I had a bit of a conspiracy theory going, which I've found out happens a lot with my work on projects. I really have no basis besides what I'm inferring from the evidence I've found, but I could totally be wrong. MassHort could really need to upkeep the buildings to make money off of visitors to support their organization, which is a bit deceiving, but has good outcomes for other sites. It still seems a bit fishy that their mission statement talks about preserving nature, while at Elm Bank the focus is on manmade structures, instead of letting the public view and help maintain more mainstream nature places, such as the woods. Hope that helps with my thinking for the question.
For column three stuff, my packet quote is from our first reading on page two. Worster writes, "By common understanding we mean by 'nature' the nonhuman world, the world we have non in any primary sense created. . . . The built environment is wholly expressive of culture; its study is already well advanced in the history of architecture, technology, and the city."
My thinking on this relates and sort of supports why I think MassHort is doing a crap job educating and preserving nature at Elm Bank. They claim, "encouraging the science and practice of horticulture and developing the public's enjoyment, appreciation, and understanding of plants and the environment," is their mission but really? Come on now. Does a small garden and a library really do that, especially at your headquarters? As Worster puts it, they are still created by human, therefore not nature. It is part of the built environment. I guess now I'm getting into answering my question. I suppose I was wrong for being so upset with how they used nature, because they didn't. The word environment is very important in the mission statement. Worster tells us this includes manmade things, so it makes sense that MassHort keeps up the buildings. As for plants, I'm still a bit upset that the woods isnt kept up. Alright, so Worster and the quote I picked basically corrected me, which is frustrating. But, for the real question I had, not sure yet. I'm going to say yes a little bit. It seems like the environment is closely tied in with appearance, so while it isn't a main goal, it nicely happens with a priority.
rough ramble there, sorry.
Last edited by dylanh on Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:01 pm; edited 1 time in total
The public cannot easily access the tracks in Weston because privately owned land surrounds it and in some cases the track is privately owned. How did something used by the public become private and how does that change from public to private effect the track, people and the land surrounding it?
I was think that because of the switch from public use to private a great resource to the surrounding communities of the track has been taken away in the areas the track is privately owned. Although it is not a railroad anymore the track would still be a great resource to get around by biking, rollerblading, etc. and would help connect communities. Some towns have gone ahead and made the track into a public rail trail but other communities like Weston have not. This question I think relates to the Yellowstone reading. Although Yellowstone is a public park I think it presented some of the same problems especially to the Native Americans. To the Native Americans essentially the park was a private park because they were not allowed on and not allowed to hunt like they had been for generations. A great resource for them had been taken away much like the abandonment of the railroad and the consequent privatization of some parts of the track took a great resource away from the people. People can no longer travel on many parts of it because it is privately owned or the land around it is privately owned. The only way to get to the tracks in some cases is to trespass and risk being arrested much like the Native Americans risked being arrested if they hunted in Yellowstone.
The question I chose was “does the accessibility of manageable nature make the property around it more valuable if not monetarily than sentimentally?”
I don’t have the physical reading packet with me, so forgive me if I misquote, but I related this question to the reading we did on Seaworld. Seeing animals and aspects of wilderness that people would never see in their normal daily lives is an amazing experience and obviously that would be worth paying for. Why should inhabitants of this neighborhood have to pay more to experience nature that is literally right in their own backyard? There is another neighborhood on the other side of the aqueduct that has a single public entrance as the only explicit entrance, and all the houses are roughly the same size. In my neighborhood the closer you get to the aqueduct the larger the houses get. It is not like the aqueduct is like a magic portal to the African savannah. It is a public space, and it doesn’t make sense that people who want to use it either need to go out of their way (there is another entrance off of one of the main roads leading to the neighborhood), or through someone’s private property. To sum up all my rambling I guess I could just say “private access to public space doesn’t make sense”
Olivia, I think you bring up some very good points. I would like to try to answer your question even though I have nothing to back my opinion up. Because Mt. Auburn Cemetery was not in the city and from what I understand far enough away that walking to it was not possible I believe it definitely did restrict the type of people that went to the cemetery. The people I believe who went there were the upper middle class and upper class. Being able to get out of polluted cities and go to a park or national park like Mt. Auburn should be something everyone should experience. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case in today’s world. People with money can afford to take time off from their job and pay the gas money to drive to a national park in another state or to fly there and then to pay the fee to get into the park. Sadly, I think the truth is that lower class people are not able to in general have the experience of being in a very isolated place without the chaos and pollution of the city, like in a national park. I think this also went for Mt. Auburn Cemetery in the past but now I think with all the public transportation people who live in Boston no matter what there economic status might be can go to visit it. For the other national parks though I think it is still the same as in the past. That only the rich can go.
Does this mean Mount Auburn should actually have been in the city so that everyone can experience it?
Even though everyone would have been able to access it I do not think that Mt. Auburn should have been in the city because it would have defeated the entire purpose of it being a tranquil place unless there was an undeveloped piece of land in the city, which I don’t think there was. Although I do not like saying this it just seems like there is no possible way to have a tranquil peaceful park in the city. That would be great because everyone would have access to it but I think the plants would not thrive because of all the pollution and because there are not big swaths of land in the city that are not developed.
The question I chose was:
Although John Elliot had to legally request 2,000 acres from the town of Dedham to form the Indian settlement of Natick (now, South Natick) he also had to formally request that the Speene sons, who’s land inheritance consisted of the majority of South Natick, give up this land as commons. Instead of selling it to John Elliot and the Praying Indians, the Speene’s donated it “In the name of God” (HMCM, p.515). Between the town of Dedham and the Speene sons ultimate donation of the land, how much did religion allow John Elliot to circumvent financial negotiation and land bargaining to establish and develop South Natick?
Instead of choosing a question and trying to think of an associated reading, this was one of my few questions that was initially formed with the HELP of a reading, that is, the reading on Municipal Water Reform in Boston (Rawson.) The connection that temperance activists made for the beauty and assumed moral high ground of water so as to best support there cause was/is an interesting one. While the example Rawson uses of the temperance activists is a fairly transparent (at least, in the retrospective) example of utilizing nature as a means for marketing and support, I think it really speaks to this higher idea of who is the most moral, and therefore, knowing what is best to do to/with nature.
It was clear in my research that the colonists of dedham gave automatic deference to Revered John Elliott, assuming that his religious status had also endowed him with a clearer vision of land utilization. I think this is something we continue to see today, assuming that environmentalists, if given the chance, would know the "best" thing to do with our remaining nature. Kind of like Olivia Becker's acknowledgment of "who gets to appreciate nature," I found both myself and Rawson focusing more on what the qualifications are/were for utilizing, and commanding nature.
Last edited by rlevinson2011 on Wed Feb 02, 2011 5:38 pm; edited 1 time in total
First of all, as a preface, the place i'm doing is the Haffenreffer Brewery in JP.
My question os "30 of the 31 breweries in JP shut down during the prohibition era, and giant national breweries thwarted those who attempted to come back after prohibition ended. But the Haffenreffer Brewery didn't shut down until 1965. How did it manage to survive the prohibition era and last so much longer than all the other breweries?
For a while i couldn't figure out which reading this was like, because so little of my project interacts with non-human factors. But i found some parallels between the Brewery and the article by Michael Rawson, The Nature of Water, simply because both issues took place in Boston, and the swell of immigration (specifically the irish population) related to both issues. For the water, it was largely a bad thing, rising the cost of managing the poor, created religious tention because of the heavy Puritan beliefs in the area, etc. But the irish and german immigrants were part of the reason why the Haffenreffer Brewery went up in the first place. Both Ireland and Germany were historically famous for brewing beer, and therefore they would be eager to find a place in their new homes in Boston where they could find good beer.
I'm not quite finished with my final project, so i may not be back for a while, but i promise i shall answer someone else's question before the night is up. Also, if someone think my question/thoughts are jumbled and not very easy to understand, feel free to ask me to clarify, and ill do so (to the best of my ability, no promises).
I did the pond in front of Belmont High for my project… it used to be factory land and a brickyard, which was eventually left to fill in with water from Wellington Brook.
After Claypit was used as a dump [for several years], the Town of Belmont built a culvert to connect it to the Mystic River system. How did this affect the North Cambridge and Somerville residents downstream? Did anybody object to the water quality in Wellington Brook?
I’ll admit that this is a bit of a loaded question, and while I have no idea what the answer is, I know that poor communities get shafted with depressing regularity when it comes to water rights and pollution. This question is the one I most want answered, and so my column II quickly descended into ranting about environmental justice and social justice and chemical dumping in Dudley Square.
More to the point, though, I’m curious about how all that has changed, even over the past forty years— is it harder to use neglected/ignored neighborhoods (urban or rural, poor or rich) as dumping grounds today than it was in the ‘90’s? The ‘70s? The just-post-industrial-revolution period?
Rawson (the water reading) covered a lot of material on how economic status affects our “environment” and our rights to resources. A biggie in his text is that it took a while for people to see water the way we (at least our class) do now- as finite, measurable, and a basic human right. “Landlords refused to pay for plumbing in their tenements… as late as 1868, one hydrant serviced the 72 tenemants of Institute Ave in the North End…. Such small and inconvenient supplies of water could not possibly provide all the benefits for which reformers had hoped”. It was difficult to get the idea of public water off the ground when there was already a fixed public way of thinking about it. Similarly, I suspect a culvert wouldn’t have been built between Claypit and the lower Mystic River if the Mystic wasn’t already polluted as hell- the mentality for a very long time was that poor, urban areas would always have dirty waterways and that was just how things “had” to be.
Also surprising: “the bucket, the well, the lake, gave way to more formal, precise and market-oriented terms like “gallon” and “dollar””. Rawson laments how long it take for this idea to catch on in support of municipal water systems, but also mentions that it made people commoditize water. By the time the culvert was built at Claypit, I suppose that a lot of people took for granted that tap water was tap water and that the waterways in their backyards couldn’t be used for the same purposes as, say, Lake Cochituate. It made me think of whatever Marx calls that problem when the consumer is distanced from what they use (help). Which was problematic, because polluted water affects urban residents in far more ways than just making water undrinkable.
My question: The development of the Ridge Hill reservation area into the RDF (Recycling and Disposal Facility) was motivated to a large degree by townwide displeasure with the practice of leaving trash on the sidewalk for private collecting companies to pick up. The residents of Wellesley were willing to pay for the development of an expensive new private (residents-only) waste facility so that they could impose a ban on visible bagged trashed. Is this merely a reflection of the strength of Wellesley’s means relative to other towns without private dumps, or does it indicate a somewhat unusual set of cultural and aesthetic priorities?
This sounds like a leading question but I didn't mean it that way. I would imagine that most towns would have some interest in encouraging residents to dispose of their trash in a less visible way if they, like Wellesley, had the available space and money to operate Be a private dump. Wellesley is also special in that, unlike many other towns and cities (for spatial, financial, and time related reasons), almost all of its citizens have are able to get to the dump once every week or two. But it doesn't seem like a purely status based thing that people don't really like to look at trash. But citizens' willingness to pay for the development and upkeep of the RDF instead of a much cheaper public waste collection service, and willingness to sacrifice the the aesthetically pleasing Ridge Hill reservation to do so seems like it might not apply to other places as does a general "trash isn't very pretty" attitude.
I connected this to the reading, "The Idea of a Garden" (Michael Pollan) about the old growth forest in Cornwall that was ravaged by a tornado in 1989. Pollan describes the debate between the The Nature Conservancy which advocated for "zero human intervention" and those who advocated for direct, intentional intervention in the ecosystem. Pollan talks about how the arguments from both sides really aren't based on any real clear distinctions, and instead just hinge on a difference in aesthetic values. My immediate reaction to the idea that a place like Ridge Hill reservation might be developed into a dump so that Wellesleyans might not have to see trashbags on the sidewalk would be one of righteous indignation, but that indignation isn't really based off of anything other than an aesthetic value of my own. While the aesthetic impact of the residents trash might be, in my eyes, greater because it occupies a space that would otherwise have at least looked natural, it's true environmental impact is actually probably less. The Wellesley RDF has a recycling/composting rate of about 60% (meaning 60% of the material brought to the dump is recycled or composted) compared to about 35% for public, state operated disposal facilities. While this seems like an undeniably good side-effect, no one used it as the basis for an argument during the debate about the future of the town's waste disposal system. Instead, as they were in the Pollan reading, both sides in a debate over a substantative issue based their arguments off of aesthetic values.
so, this whole thing is a little bit of a stretch, but we'll make it work.
The question I chose to write about was this:
(its about the main intersection in sherborn)
When were those roads laid down in their current formation and who decided on their directions? Was it before or after the town hall's construction?
I basically wrote my second column on how since I was little I've always been fascinated by how we have possibly paved/decided the direction of all the road in the world. I mean, its an incomprehensible idea- the road would only ever be visible behind you. Ahhh.
Then I got into thinking- what a fascinating piece of environmental history roads are. I mean, its a perfect example of E.H. People deciding where its most important to go, and if those roads stick, those decisions justidict the geographical culture around those road for GENERATIONS after they're laid down. Then I started thinking about centers of towns, and why we even chose the CENTER of a town for its cultural focal point, as opposed to the borders where you're closer to different cultures.
I'm connecting these thoughts back to the Eden reading. Or maybe the potential of the New England Canaan. Basically what I'm getting at is the concept of "Eden" in north america. I think along with all the beautiful plants and majestic, untouched natural beauty there's something important there about the lack of paths and roads.
To discover a place where there are no roads would be intimidating, but also like discovering a place with no pre-determined destiny. Not even a suggestion of pre-determined destiny. Your future would be something you had to make.
Alright. This is horrible. I'm stopping myself.
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