Writing Migration

For the final paper of my major’s communication requirement, I had to write both a scientific and a non-scientific abstract, which honestly was kind of ridiculous. Maybe that is too harsh, it was just a misnomer. The ‘non-scientific’ abstract was for scientist that was in a very slightly different field (and would still be gibberish to many other scientist.) Another great feat of the communication requirement, from the introductory biology class, was rewriting Mendel’s famous pea genetics paper without using any modern genetic terminology or discoveries like chromosome, DNA, or Meiosis. So what everyone did was write the paper with words like gene and then methodically replace every ‘gene’ with trait. Problem solved.

But, not really. Explaining or writing about science to a ‘non-scientific’ audience takes more that just switching a single word or throwing out some terminology and abbreviations. Not that I’ve figured it all out, but from conversations with my younger siblings, it takes more explanation of larger context, real-life comparisons to incorporate previous knowledge or experiences, and possibly entertaining personal antidotes.

I arrived at the chemistry lab with the feeling that I understood some of the chemical properties of acetone engrained from my father’s stories. Acetone is used to light tennis balls on fire and play soccer in the dark. It is ‘safe’ because it burns cooler, and will not ignite your clothing, however, you might lose some arm hair and make sure to stop, drop and roll if in doubt.

In the reading that we have done for class so far this semester, the authors have used different techniques for holding the interest of their reader and reaching a broader audience than an academic environmental paper. The use of the personal narrative, as often seen in classical nature writing, gives the reader a character to follow. I think that this works well for connecting different events and allows the writing to give personal revelations about deeper connections or meaning between things.

I guess, I think that I am writing my essays for a fairly general audience. The blog contains many personal antidotes, which I hope are interesting in holding the attention of the reader. In essay one, I wrote about a personal decision, and interaction with nature to explore different concepts with out nature is enjoyed and interpreted by people. I was interested in the way in a partial division between artistic and scientific appreciation for organisms, creatures, landscapes and environments. I guess in this un-political essay, I am not trying to reach a different audience.

I viewed the blogs as a way to write down thoughts in semi-complete form to think about for the essays. The different bits and pieces of personal descriptions and life-story hopefully establish where I am coming from as a ‘character’ and why I may have certain opinions, like my personal grudge against urban sprawl. The fact that the blogs are on the web, make the audience potentially anyone surfing online. However, I guess I don’t think anyone that didn’t know me would read it. For my last essay, I am trying to use comedy to relate global issues that have a political context, like global warming, and poke fun over what we should be doing to prepare. With comedy, and digested scientific details, I am trying to write for a general audience. However, I think the premise of the joke may not be clear and that the biology factoids will not hold peoples interest as much as I think. My bias in loving biology factoids has made me think everyone is interested. However, I think that the audience is still fairly large, because books like “Dr. Tattini’s Sex Advice to all Creation” have sold well. I am striving to make essay 2 both funny and full of interesting (but brief) biology.

The Suburban Entropy

In Blog 3, I wrote about the loss of the old farmhouse that my mother was renting. It was consumed by expanding suburb growth. To me it was a loss of another home, and the forced movement into a vinyl-sided one-story rancher in a community with all of three house architectural phenotypes; i.e. a middle class suburb. By middle class, which could seem like a redundant description of a suburb, I mean not the huge build-your-own-mansion communities or the compact low-cost development with a scenic view of the roaring belt-way. The cities are shrinking, the suburbs are spreading and open lands are suffering.

Now that I kind of live in a suburb, I guess I cannot be completely anti-suburb. All in all, it is a nice house that has a low-key relaxing and safe atmosphere. BUT, I just feel like all the terrain in the United States could become evenly covered in suburbia; just as water spreads through a paper towel by capillary force and just as gas particles fill the container by becoming evenly spaced. The suburbs may yield a type of entropy-death ending of the North American environment, in which all space has been inefficiently used up; strip malls complete with the same chain stores, parking lots with spaces large enough for Ford Explorers, and exponential growth of branching neighborhood roads without sidewalks. Everyone drives everywhere to consume more fossil fuels. No one can get anywhere without driving, because there are no public transportation or no bike paths.

My opinion about sidewalks is tainted by a few things 1) the inability to safely walking the dog around the neighborhood, because of all the stubborn drivers that are unwilling to share the road 2) being scared for my life when trying to exercise by either running or biking and 3) the arrest of my little brother for ‘trespassing’ when he was walking on the edges of peoples yards at night, when the oncoming traffic would be even more dangerous.

Well, that is some of my beef with suburbs. The concept of entropy-death, as applied to suburbia scares me. No more wilderness, no more areas that can be defined as outside the metropolitan area, because everything is blended together into an indistinguishable existence. The boredom, the boredom.

What does the suburb life satisfy? At first people get to move out of the dangerous cities and get a larger property for the same price. The cities may implode as the wealthy and middle class retreat to the (American)-dreamy suburbs. However, the newly found paradise is compromised once the next suburb takes root (most likely takes away roots) further away from the city. People are still commuting into the business center, and therefore more highways are needed to accommodate the daily migrations. Morning high tide of workers surges into the city and evening low tide drains back into the exterior.

What can be done? Well, one reason that suburbs continue to be favorable is the lower price of undeveloped land outside the cities and the older suburbs. The economics of this type of development does not make sense however. If more suburbs are built, then there will be a need for the extension of power and water facilities and the building of roads and new schools. The money for education is drained out of the inner city because the state taxes are now being used for suburban development. Bottom line, there needs to be a higher economic value of undeveloped lands (both in the wilderness and the transition zones of old farm lands). There needs to be more of an economic benefit for both building and living in the city. There should be regulations about building new strip malls and dozens of football-field sized parking lots.

I just spent sometime over spring break visiting family in Granada, Spain. The ancient city had small roads that restricted the physical size of cars, which as with most European countries were already quite compact in comparison. In Madrid, functional subway and bus system and parking lots underneath the city plazas kept the city pleasant and walk-able. The creation of quant European cities, I realize is out of the question. However, I think that some kind of equilibrium can be reached to keep people living in cities and already exciting suburbs, hopefully before all the possible space used up.

My House Habitats

Just so I can frame the story correctly, I have to talk about my parents divorce. It happened during my freshman year of college, with a somewhat abrupt announcement over thanksgiving dinner. I was upset, but mostly for my brother and sister who still lived at home. I thought about how much we were going to miss our childhood house. It was located within the city limits, but it was surrounded by tall-old oak trees and built comfortably into a hill. The house had a tin roof, which amplified the sound of rain and falling acorns. The house wasn’t new and didn’t have central air, so during the summer all the windows would be open and there would be a refreshing breeze. The shade of the oaks helped lower the temperature in the humid Baltimore summers. The house had a pleasant smell of moist wood and felt trapped in time.

After the split, my mother rented an old farmhouse on the edge of the growing suburbs. It had a whitewash barn with rusted latches and an abandoned chicken coop in which the wood floors were rotting away. Inside the house, none of the floors were horizontal; a pen placed in the middle of the room would roll to the far wall. There was barely enough space to get up the steep slippery steps without hitting our heads or sliding down on our butts. The whole structure felt like it was slowly sinking into the ground. It was great. The backyard was filled with trees and overlooked currently worked and retired fields. We would see foxes, white-tailed deer, hares, hawks, and owls. My mother picked the house because of its organic and lived in feel; like the feeling of holding a smooth heavy clay bowl, that is just the right size to curl between your hands. Things feel as if they fit together, and that things are connected, solid, and real. In this way the house felt more natural (like the previous house, I share my mother’s taste in this matter) than many of my friends.
I spent a good chunk of my summer break cleaning out the loft of the barn to utilize as a painting studio. I remember the first time I went exploring up the creaky ladder, the one dust covered window let in defined beams of evening light that traced their way across the room on suspended spider webs. The space had become a type of junk storage many years earlier and was filled with old abandoned furniture, metal toy soldiers, paper dolls, wasp nests and the remains of faded-orange ladybugs. The space made a very unique place to work, but I only completed one painting before I had to rush back to college in Boston.

Over the course of the next fall, to my dismay, the landlady decided to sell the land to contractors. She sold the house, the small forest behind surrounding it, and the cornfield across the street to feed the suburban growth craze. Everything was going to be leveled. I guess we should have seen it coming, just a few miles down the street a successful housing development had gone up a new CVS Drug and probably a Wal-Mart had recently opened their doors, complete with their expansive, freshly pored parking lot, which appeared as a mirage after driving through the open fields. The distance to the site of the old farmhouse was just far enough to build large brick million-dollar homes with five bathrooms and a pool for the rich to live away from it all but still close to convenience. Suburban sprawl is spreading over the landscape, engulfing places that seemed to have set up a new equilibrium with nature. There are many organisms that have adjusted to the farm life, that are not ‘farm animals’, as in birds, insects, plants. It may not be primary growth, but the land is slowly regaining viable habitat for a diverse number of creatures.

The unrestricted growth of the suburbs, just like cancerous cells in the body, are invading healthy human-nature areas and rapidly acquiring new mutations that make them more virulent. The suburbs are able to recruit utilities to feed the growing need just as tumors become able to recruit blood vessels and grow in size. The expansion becomes independent of living in one location and the suburbs metastasize, spreading the gross mass development to new areas and slowly taking over. But chemotherapy will not bring back the old farmhouse and my loft studio in the barn. We didn’t catch it soon enough for it to be operable.

City Nature

I was always amazed at the dramatically colorful sunsets in Tucson. On the patio of family friends, over the spiny cactus and the scrubby, knotted bushes, with the backdrop of encircling mountains, the sky would fill with reds and oranges over a deep cobalt. Then, there would be a smooth transition to purples and pinks until it was dark and the city became a mirror reflecting the stars. I openly spoke of these striking sunsets, only to have many people frankly tell me it was because of pollution. Nevertheless, the sunset was still aesthetically pleasing and breathtaking (the pollution information was not from fact-trusting sources, and maybe untrue – feel free to ignore and enjoy guilt free). Breathtaking was not meant to be a pun…but it raises the issue of beauty not being skin deep. If the striking sunset was in fact the result of pollution, can it still be beautiful?

Down the hill from my old house in Baltimore, there was a small creek. I would take expeditions with my younger brother, Chad, and sister, Jocelyn, to the creek. We would first crawl down an eroded bank on exposed tree roots. The runoff from the neighborhood houses and roads steels the topsoil away from the dying roots. We would slowly work are way up the stream, stepping stone to stone and keeping our eyes open for stuff to collect. The forest flora around the creek quickly disappeared, as the banks of the stream became cement. Stubborn weeds grew though the cracks and clever vines meandered over the walls. There were small vertical drops created by rectangular blocks of concrete, which we still delightfully called waterfalls, as if they matched the western wilderness of Ansel Adams. Chad and I would bring bags to carry home our new collects, and Jocelyn would hand over what she found if we didn’t put it in her pocket. Our collections included spiny sycamore seedpods, broken glass of different colors, maple leaves, discarded rollerblade wheels, acorns, abandoned clothing, pebbles, decaying magazines, dried insects, plastic wrapping, bird feathers, bike parts, coiled vines, toy solders, snail shells, and pieces of rusting metal. Further upstream, the walls became covered with graffiti; words, names, faces, geometrical shapes. My favorite piece was slightly obstructed by an advancing poison ivy plant, which no body dared to tare down. The piece was an expressionist-style face with enlarged eyes and mouth and a wavy head of hair, its uniqueness and style gave away (to me) the artist as an older boy in my art class. All the colorful graffiti, abandoned spay paint cans of the experimenting artists, cigarette butts and crushed beer cans showed that this section was visited frequently, but was still normally secluded and on the outskirts of peoples’ thoughts.

When the stream was shallow, we would adventure through the tunnel and further upstream. The hard part was getting over the large pool at the opening of the tunnel, which was often filled with differently colored algae, including green, yellow, red, and brown. The fertilizers from green grassy yards had overproduced all sorts of engulfing algae, which we would inspect by poking with long bamboo sticks (the invasive/alien bamboo being the available plant) and uncontrollably yell ‘ewww’ at the gross-smelly-gooey substance. On the other side of the tunnel urban plants flourished along artificial banks, made of large stones held in place with chicken wire, until the commercial district started. Here, stagnant pools were sometimes iridescent with a film of organic solvent, like oil or gasoline, floating on top, which had ran off from the nearby gas station parking lot after it rained. Jocelyn would get tired or hungry, and the three of us would craw out of the stream and walk home.

The small city stream was our playground of choice, because of the isolation from adults, the variety of things that could be found, and most importantly, the location of it with respect to our house. In high school, I was part of an environmental group that traveled the same rout on this stream, picking up the litter and trash (but no longer collecting leaves and seedpods). To me, in a type of absolute sense, the stream would be better if it were pristine, but in the gradation of good and bad, a concrete-enclosed stream is better than no stream and can still be worth exploring.

Nature

The beach in the winter, with its vast emptiness of people and abrupt exposure to the elements, clears my mind. I walk along the same coast of Assateague Island that I have been coming to since I was six years old. The shoreline and dune structures have been altered by harsh winds and tropical storms. The power lines and wooden bathhouses have been washed way and the roads have been lost under the sand. Every year I look for changes made by the storms and ocean currents. The sand bar, which creates a second set of breakers, oscillates distance from year to year. New pieces of majestic driftwood from old-marsh tree trunks wash ashore, with dark curvy roots and enticing organic crevasses.
Hard winds blow east, out over the ocean, and carry the top layers of dry sand down the beach. The land does not seam solid with so much sand in motion. The large crushing waves fight back against the wind to break and dash ashore. Water from the apex of the waves is vaporized into thick mist and blown back without reaching the beach. When the sun appears from behind the cumulous clouds, transient rainbows appear in the mist above the waves. Normally, there are sanderlings playing tag with the attacking and receding waves. They rush in, taking quick steps with their short-thin legs, peak around for food and then quickly retreat before getting hit by the next layer of white water. But today they are scare because of the miniature sand storm. A herring or possibly an immature laughing gull flies fruitlessly against the prevailing winds and remains almost stationary in mid air.
I walk north and think about the currents of the ocean, the changes in pressure that create wind (and doesn’t the wind usually blow onshore during the day?), the clouds as moisture in the air. I became interested in biology (my major) through a fascination with nature. When I was young, I collected, drew, and photographed all kinds of plants, fungi, seashells and insects. The spiny-intricate compartments, the right-handed and left-handed spirals, and the iridescent-green exoskeletons all fuel my curiosity into the inner-workings of nature. Now, I am working on investigating inner-workings of cells, the protein and DNA pathways that transmit a signal and integrate various signals to direct discrete cell fates during development. Nature’s complexity and rich organic life intrigue me, and I enjoy thinking about nature objectively, for example, how all Earth’s organisms were produced by forces of evolution / natural selection / divergence / and chance occurrences.
As the winds calm, I can see the stationary beach. Broken and ocean-tumbled seashells line the beach near the end of high tide. I pick up a partially buried Moon Snail shells, which fits nicely in the palm of my hands. The stout circular spiral has a tan surface with touches of orange/ pink, blue, black, white, and maroon. There is a smooth approach to center of the spiral, and the lines get smaller and smaller until I can no longer make out the turns and there is only a dark spot. The squashed spherical shape makes the illusion of the end edge melding back into the beginning and forever spiraling. If I had a microscope, I may have been able to look closer and see the center of the spiral continue for longer, but this is not why I enjoy picking up seashells. I enjoy nature on more than just a scientific level. I enjoy the shapes, colors, hues, intensities, contrasts, forms, chaos and symmetry as a purely visual experience (…when I can flip from one side of the brain to the other…).
The beach continues on for many miles, and even recent traces of humans began to disappear. There are no more power lines, no more trash cans, no more abandoned flip-flops, no more tire tracks from the park ranger. I enjoy interacting with environment without humans. It feels both fresh and ancient. And again, as I look out over the brackish marsh, with a large gathering of migratory snow geese, I am reminded that I feel connected to the bigger world and possibly even some larger force of nature that calms and regenerates the planet when I over looking an extensive landscape. The snow geese take fright; possibly one goose with sensitive nerves, and the whole flock honks into the air and circles around in the sky – not being able to choice a particular direction.
For my personal concept or definition of nature, I do not try to create a definition of nature without Homo sapiens. However, I am not eager to include the triumphs of American culture like strip-malls, fast food, amusement parks, and Wal-Mart into the same category. I watched captain planet as a child. I think that the planet needs to be saved and nature, as in flora, fauna, and ‘natural’ ecosystems, needs to be preserved and allowed to bounce back the best that they can. So, not that I sing, but I leave you with a tid-bit of a song: “Captain Planet, he’s our hero, going to take pollution down to zero, going to help him put asunder, bad guys that want to lute and plunder…(drawing a blank)… we are planet-ters, you can be one too, because saving the planet is the thing to do, … the power is yours!”