Module 3: Anthropological geoscience is a mouthful

Explain:
Teaching has had a profound impact on how I view the world.  At all times when I am in front of my class I am monitoring my sentences - from structure to vocabulary - to ensure that my message is received as I intended.  I fail often.  But the more experience I gain, the better I get.  I notice that this monitoring of language enters into my thinking as I read - whether educational research or quantum physics articles or 2300 year old geometry proofs or, umm, Twilight, only these times the modifications I am making are those that translate the text out of the author's voice, be it professional, jargon- filled  or a sappy teen romance vocabulary, and into one that I am more comfortable with.  The ability to do this has taken years, but its affects are beneficial to my comprehension and retention of the material I read.  It's an interesting thing when you get down to the reason this skill is important to me: it helps me be successful in my day-to-day life.  It gives me background for teaching concepts or provides strategies to try in my classroom or maybe it just simply gives me something to talk about with my friends.  In short, learning through books helps me survive in my environment.

Euclid's Elements

I have no excuse for this

But living in rural Alaska has given me a new perspective on the use of the word "survive."  And it's given me reason to believe that the skills I've spent years acquiring back in Minnesota may not be adequate for what is meant by survival in the tundra.  In rural Alaska, to survival skills are literally that - skills that will allow one to survive (i.e. not die) in an often hostile environment.  Or when the environment is only a little hostile, the ability to make it through a day without ending up waste deep in water a mile from home while walking through the tundra.

As I stated above, it took years to become proficient at being able to translate written language into my memory, it appears it will also take years to become proficient in being able to translate the language I am being provided here in Tununak.  My lessons come in a variety of modalities, but I am coming to recognize most are subtle spoken stories or veiled recommendations.  Take my example from above with me falling into the tundra.  I'd read about the tundra before this experience.  I'd seen movies and pictures, consulted websites and even remembered bits and pieces of information about the tundra from my time in elementary school.  None of this, it seems, was enough to prevent what was to happen.

Falling into the tundra

We had decided to walk from our village to Toksook, another village about six miles away through the tundra.  This would be my first true experience in the tundra.  Asking our guide, lifetime resident of the tundra, if we needed rubber boots we were given a cryptic response: "Well, you don't need boots."  Hours later we had learned a valuable lesson - one that would come in handy many times in the future.  On an immediate level - the answer the our question was yes.  We had missed the hints and as a result were quite wet upon arriving at our destination.  One of our party actually ended up waist deep in a surprise puddle.  But on a larger level, the lesson we learned was that advice was rarely explicitly given.  Hints, subtle hints, were about all we were given.  Whether a cultural characteristic or a misunderstanding about our knowledge of the environment, the results were the same - we were wet. My reading had not prepared me for this.    

Extend: 
Watching the Richard Glenn video I connected with the scientists that he took out on the ice.  They had spent their professional careers acquiring skills and knowledge necessary to survive in their environment, and yet when they are in the environment of their knowledge, they are next to helpless.  This ties in with last weeks examination of traditional vs Western science - where Western science is strongly tied with learning from books and experiments -removing the subject from its natural environment.  Traditional Native science is about experiencing the subject in its natural environment and making decisions based on that.

Evaluate:
Moving forward with these ideas I am trying beginning to see strengths in both views.  Geography influences the way we learn and it influences what we know about the environment we live in.  Richard Glenn lives in a unique situation and I enjoy the metaphor of shining two flashlights down the same path.  It alludes to more being known about a topic when it is looked at through multiple lenses.   

Newtok with the river to the east

I feel that it is very important to have people like Glenn living in the villages.  It seems hardly a week goes by when a science or environmentally related topic doesn't bring about some level of discussion in our community.  Last year I spent time with my class looking at an article in the New York Times about another village, Newtok, in our district.  Newtok is in danger of being washed into the river that runs alongside it as warming trends in the past decade have led to less permafrost enabling increased erosion along the banks of the river.  They are referred to in the article as being among the first climate refugees in the United States.  Inevitably, Newtok will need to be moved to the other side of the river - at significant financial costs borne by an organization not yet named.  Residents of Newtok blame the government for this problem - it was after all, the government that decided that Newtok (which was traditionally a seasonal fish camp) would become a permanent civilization.

And then just this past week a debate flared up about the building of a new runway in Tununak.  Our current airstrip is too small for larger planes to land and lined up in a direction that allows for too many crosswind days.  Plans for the new runway are underway with construction planned to start in 2012.  The problem is that the location for the runway, as well as the source of the material being used to build the runway will likely have serious environmental consequences on the river - a major source of food for people in the village.

I wonder what it would be like if more of the people involved in making these decisions had an education in both forms of science.  I wonder how geography has influenced peoples' educations and views ecological situations.  Are there better solutions out there?

 Three Classmates' Blogs: 
I just got finished visiting Cheryl's Explore Palmer blog.  There is an intriguing photograph there of her father-in-law standing waste deep in a crack cause by the 1964 earthquake.  Pretty neat stuff.

Kevin's blog threw an interesting twist into his blog by incorporating his business related knowledge and looking at how the economic resources of an area affect the types of industry that are present in that area.

My third blog I visited this week was the Dan Adair Blog site.  I enjoyed reading Dan's ruminations on how supermarkets can skew our views of food production and how that these new views might be a hindrance to seeing the many cycles that exist in ecology.

Anyone who's made it this far should know that I have wikipedia to thank for a lot of my sources.  I also have wikipedia to thank for this.  It is hard to get out of a black hole, but I did it.