“You have to know how to see what’s here.”
It’s not an exact quote, but when I was studying economics in the late 70s, a friend of mine in the program said something like this to me one day as we were driving I-95 between West Palm Beach and Boca Raton, and he began pointing things out—old neighborhoods, new developments, business districts, malls—and talking about economic geography, location theory, the study of how villages, towns, cities, and the economic activities that occur within them, come to be located where they are on a landscape.
In early 2008, I was asked to have the Zen Center of Los Angeles certified as a wildlife habitat, something that several of our members had done for their backyards. On the website of the National Wildlife Federation there is a questionnaire one can fill out indicating which features your place offers for the support of wildlife. The basic categories are food, water, shelter, and places to raise young, and within each of these the questionnaire lists the kinds of things a place might have that would provide these ecosystem services. If enough of them are present, NWF will add your place to their registry of wildlife habitats and send you a plaque.
This certification program serves to identify habitat and encourage its maintenance, wherever the necessary elements are found or can be created, whether it be a farm, a neighborhood park, a backyard, or an apartment balcony. Living in the midst of a vast city, with so much of our daily life devoted to interacting with each other and immersed in the myriad artifacts of our civilization, it becomes too easy a habit of mind to perceive only the human realm, and so difficult to recognize even a backyard for all that it actually is.
So I printed out the questionnaire and began to walk the grounds, noting as I went how this thing or that one fit into one or another of their categories. It was a wonderful experience. It allowed me to see my surroundings, things I passed by every day, in a new way.
Continue reading →
