Our lives involve all kinds of risks.  But lately I have been contemplating the concept of risk at the cultural landscape level.  My reading has focused on the intersection of theological and biological understandings of risk and how they might relate to cultural landscape expressions.   Sounds like a strange combination of thoughts.  Perhaps it is.

 I contemplated these issues recently as I drove from downtown Los Angeles to San Diego, transitioning from the placeless cultural landscape of highways, mass residential developments and shopping malls of L.A. to the neighborhoods of San Diego, defined by their individual personalities and orientation to the ocean—La Jolla Cove, Bird Rock, Pacific Beach, Mission Bay, Ocean Beach.

 Openness of God theology, still within the range of orthodox Christianity, characterizes God as fully and personally interactive with humanity, while remaining in charge, even if not in control.  Theologian Clark Pinnock says in his book, Most Moved Mover:  A theology of God’s Openness, that in contrast to the more traditional view based on meticulous providence and exhaustive foreknowledge, this theological perspective sees the future as partly settled and partly unsettled, partly determined and partly undetermined and thus partly unknown even to God.  This involves a risk on the part of God.  God does have sovereignty but has decided to make some of his actions contingent on our actions and requests; God has chosen to exercise a general rather than meticulous providence—to be resourceful in response to our choices.

 So what does this have to do with biology and ecology? If theologians like Pinnock are emphasizing the risk involves in God giving humans choice, what about nature?  Does nature “possess” free will or is its future largely pre-determined according to natural processes?  Is there risk involved in terms of the open-endedness of ecological processes and nature’s direction? Bruno Latour, in Politics of Nature:  How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, pushes for a more open sense of possibilities equally for both, arguing that “The only thing that can be said about them is that they emerge in surprising fashion, lengthening the list of beings that must be taken into account…What better foundation for common sense than the very self-evidence of these humans and nonhuman actors whose association is sometimes surprising?” (Latour 2004, 79).

 Likewise, ecological understanding has moved from a more linear model of succession of species to a more complex and open-ended view. C.S. Holling again uses the word “surprise” to describe adaptive responses within ecosystems. Likewise David Bartholomew (God, Chance and Purpose:  Can God Have it Both Ways?) describes chance in nature as playing the role of introducing flexibility and resilience in the face of uncertainty and risk.

Risk, surprise, adaptation, resilience, responsiveness…

Is God a risk taker where he takes actions with the outcome uncertain? Is risk a bad think or is it something that builds resilience, something we seek out naturally?  And what does this have to do with cultural landscapes like those of Los Angeles and San Diego?  Can I understand these two different cultural landscapes through these concepts—the placeless cultural landscape of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods of San Diego.  One shaped by highways, mass residential developments and shopping malls; the other made up of neighborhoods defined by their individual personalities and orientated to the ocean. 

Should I be surprised by their differences?  What choices led to these two different cultural landscapes, both embedded within a Mediterranean climate region?  Were the differences inevitable?  And which landscape best represents the possibility of resilience in the face of change?  Which is most responsive to the needs of society and nature?

Risk, surprise, adaptation, resilience, responsiveness…

I contemplate these questions as I travel

San Diego

Los Angeles

I flew into Michigan to visit friends and family.  As the plane descended, wide open spaces appeared with straight roads, one mile apart, running along the cardinal directions.  Farm land extended as far as you could see and forests were restricted to the river and stream valleys.

Ah…this is the way it is supposed to be.  I relaxed.

Being new to the region, someone recently asked me where I had ended up going to church.  I remarked that I had been either going to Highrock Salem, a church plant, or to an Episcopal church in Hamilton.

A moment of confused silence was followed by the question:  “But aren’t these at the opposite ends of the high church-low church spectrum?”

“Well, yes.”  I said.  “But I just can’t decide, so I get up each Sunday morning and decide which I am drawn to that week.” [ Actually, if the truth be known, I keep trying to figure out how to belong to both of them.]

Sitting in the Episcopal church Sunday morning, having chosen high church this week, it finally came to me—it wasn’t about choosing high church or low church.  It was all about local and global!  You know the phrase:  think global; act local.  I had just spent the week focused locally.  I had attended two basketball games, gone to a dinner with two faculty departments, and attended a local concert.  I needed a more global worship experience where I could be alone but still feel part of the church universal  through a globally recognized and focused liturgy.  This is the liturgy that moves from prayer for people who are alone, to the community, the nation and the world.  It is the service that moves through confession to absolution and the giving of peace, to consecration and communion.  It is the form that I recognize from Anglican churches I have attended around the world, allowing me to be alone, yet remember my belonging to the universal church.

At other times, I need to connect locally to feel like I belong and so I go to the other church.  There I find people who are connected to my networks that in turn connect local places together.  The church is Evangelical Covenant, which means it has Swedish roots.  American Swedes have connections to Minnesota and often to Bethel College, so along with chatting with people I know from work, I also connect with people who have roots in another local place—Minnesota.  I might run into someone who knows someone I know.  And the focus of the church is much more on reaching out to the local community.  When I feel like I need to belong here, to a local congregation, then I go to Highrock.

This global/local distinction has led me to think about networks and flows as well.  I recently ended up talking with a group of people who all had connections to the American Baptist denomination.  We had grown up in different parts of the world, but had all spent time at the national conference grounds in Green Lake, WI when we were growing up.  The denomination might be the network, but the conference ground was the node in the flow pattern.

I believe my desire for the global partially comes in response to spending many years within the Dutch Reformed community in North America.  It is a community that you could say is national, or international, but really it is made up of a network of locals—Sioux County, IA; Pella, IA; Lynden, WA;  Redlands, CA; Edmonton, AL; Whitinsville, MA; Western Michigan; St. Catherine, ON;  the Netherlands.  I remember being in Grand Rapids, MI, listening to a group of people talk about a particular rural intersection in northern Alberta, several thousands of miles away, and they all knew exactly where it was!  The faith tradition is one of locals and flows of people and ideas amongst these locals.

So I remain of two minds, depending on the week.  I desire to belong individually to the global church and I desire to engage communally in the local church.  Which will win out in the end?  And why do I have to choose?

I have been in my new region, but temporary apartment, for almost seven months.  I have finally been able to locate myself in regional space.  I live in an area called the North Shore.  But throughout much of time here I have been trying to decide where I want to locate myself more specifically–where do I want to buy a place to live?  Do I want to live in one of the more urban environments—Salem or Lynn—or in a small town like Ipswich?

Since reading the book Make Your Job a Calling by Bryan Dik and Ryan Duffy I have been thinking about the connection amongst these choices, vocation, and sense of place.  I have lived in many different kinds of environments:  houses in small towns in the Midwest; remote New Zealand island; high rise apartment in Hong Kong; manor house in rural England; small lot houses in an intermediate-sized American cities; suburban apartments and more urban apartments;  dormitories;  a condo;  rural line settlement in the Southern U.S.  No wonder I have trouble answering the questions for myself—What is my preference?  Do I want to live in an urban setting, a rural setting, or a small town setting?

Dik and Duffy make several comments that have gotten me thinking.  They say:  Work needs to be a good fit for you, but also for your life and its transitions.  Your calling, or work links you to the larger community and provides an arena for using your gifts with purpose for the common good.

When I look through the list of environments where I have lived, I realized that it wasn’t the particular environment that was key to my satisfaction, but rather its connection to my work.   My work has connected me to a community in a place.  My satisfaction and choices have been made based on how it will fit with my work and my family rather than something inherent to “type.”

I have to say that I am a bit unsettled by the idea of moving to a place without work to shape my engagement with the larger community.  I think I would feel a bit “placeless.”  Because of my work here I have become connected to the public library system through a collaboration, met many people involved in science-related industry who represent the local economy, and had lunch with colleagues in similar positions at other institutions close by.  I’ve met people connected to local historic preservation and met local politicians because of some of our programs.  My sense of the place has grown through this growing network that arises out of my vocation.  What would my encounter with the North Shore look like without meaningful work?  Would I just know where the shopping centers and restaurants were?

There is something inherently satisfying about meaningful work that deepens your understanding and connection to a place.  I live on the North Shore.

My father was a fisherman.  He taught all of his children and grandchildren to fish.  These fishing lessons mostly occurred at dusk, between day and night, in the small boat he kept in a strip mine lake near his home.  And we all learned that the best place to cast our lines was along the edges of the lake where the brush and trees had fallen into the water.  It was my father who first taught me to pay attention to the edges.

So as a scholar I have been drawn to the regions at the intellectual edges of disciplines.  But my curiosity extends to many types of edges like the urban edge as the landscape becomes rural.  When my daughters and I moved from a small town in Iowa to a moderate-sized city in Michigan, my daughters struggled with the concepts of rural and urban.  The first few weeks, as we drove from our house to various places they would constantly ask:  Are we in the city now?  And now are we in the city?

Cognitive psychologists will tell you that we have an inherent need to categorize just as my daughters were trying to do.  But emphasizing the distinctions and building concrete boundaries between entities keep us from discovering the richness that we find at the edges.  Recent scholarly discussions have moved toward describing reality as hybrid—part social/part natural–in order to be able to try to grapple with the meaning of these edges. Key to understanding this hybridity is the role of boundary organizations: organizations that operate ‘between’ the human and natural components of a natural resource. These organizations, such as irrigation districts or regional planning agencies, usually mediate multidirectional information flows among various governmental units that operate at different scales.

The richness of edge regions are dependent on allowing the boundary between “types” to be fuzzy, allowing the mixing of everything from ideas to nutrients, creating very rich ecosystems for plants, animals, and intellectual thought. This fall, for instance, I visited the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge on Puget Sound. At one time the estuary was diked and drained for farmland, destroying the edge region that allowed for the mixing of fresh and salt water. Today the dikes have been breached, allowing the fuzzy boundary to return, along with its birds and wildlife.  And where you find fuzzy boundaries you find avid birders!

Tree Fall–mixing soil and surface

Mountain sediment and water coming down into the estuary

Remnants of the farm

Land/Water Edges

Edge between two streams as they join and their waters mix in the estuary

We have something to learn from nature, especially as we observe what it means to restore fuzzy edges that leave space for nature to thrive.  These fuzzy edges allow for the mixing of nutrients and the movement of creatures like the snow geese to come and go across seasons and ecosystems.

Snow Geese in Puget Sound, having arrived
from the Arctic with the change in season

 As we try to create boundaries that are inflexible we leave no room for risk, for change, and for safety.  We make it difficult to change our minds or to live with our past decisions.  Hurricane Sandy surely reminded us of this lesson most recently.

Narragansett Bay damage from Hurricane Sandy

Can we learn to leave space at the edges so that we might become wise?  Can we leave the edges for fishing?

Capital cities are unique.  While trying to symbolically represent national pride and ambition, they often lack industry and mature urban structure.  Broad streets, prominent statues, and palaces or stone government buildings shape their appearance and intentions.  This leaves visitors with a sense of awe rather than a sense of place that comes from life encountered at street-level with its fine texture.

Perhaps one of the most famous capitals to intentionally exhibit these traits is Brasilia, created inland from the major Brazilian cities which lie on the coast.  Build in the 1950s it symbolized that the future of the country of Brazil faced toward its center rather than its coast.  Brasilia’s modernistic architecture—abstract with saucer-like shaped features and wide open, paved open spaces—may have impressed, but made it difficult to attract bureaucrats who would live there.  They tended to commute, returning to their families in Rio on the weekends.

In contrast to most capitals, Wellington, New Zealand is modest, just like the nation itself.  Build on the sides of hills, it couldn’t have wide streets.  Instead, paths like the Plimmer steps lead up the side of the hills where people can walk and bypass the streets.  Near the main government building, called the Beehive, the only evidence that this is the capital is the presence of a professional class of young people dressed in suits, out of place in this very relaxed and casual culture.

I recently had a free afternoon in Washington, D.C., the quintessential capital.  I decided to walk from the capital building to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end of the mall and reflecting pool, the core of the city, to gain further insight into the nature of a capital city as a representation of the national itself.  Like Brasilia, Washington, D.C. was built out of the wilderness to represent national ambition.  Charles Dickens, visiting the city in the 1840s, wrote about his impressions of this relatively new city:

“It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions…. Spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament–are its leading features.”

And perhaps my favorite Dickens quote on the nature of D.C.:  “I walk to the front window, and look across the road upon a long, straggling row of houses, one story high, terminating, nearly opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. .. And that is our street in Washington.”  The Washington Mall continues to be frowzy at times, especially after a huge public gathering for some political “march on the mall.”

What did I see as I walked that afternoon?  In the buildings that lined the Mall, I saw a representation of how we divide up our national life—IRS, Labor, Environment, Courts, Commerce, Trade, Foreign Relations.  Could we have conceived of things differently?  Could we have had a Department of Collaboration or Peace rather than Commerce, Trade, and Defense?

Other elements of a capital city were also evident—tourists who are recording their pilgrimage through photographs or through buying souvenirs.

Every capital also has to tell the story of the nation and through its exceptionalism—its heroes, its wars, its history, its cultural heritage, and its natural resources.  I’ve often wondered what happens when there is no space left for the various monuments that mark these aspects of a nation’s history.  Can there be one hero or war too many?

I am ambivalent when it comes to capitals.  Their lack humility and honesty thus leave me conflicted.  Beijing, with its Forbidden City also has its Tiananmen Square.  Washington, D.C. now has the museum of the American Indian, but no doubt, the Smithsonian Museum basement is full of stolen Native American artifacts, if not skeletons.   There is something disturbing about the view of the world from within the Capital Beltway.

US Department of Labor

.Department of Labor—France Perkins Bldg;  Frances Perkins was the US Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, and the first woman appointed to the US Cabinet, serving the entire FDR.

WW II Monument

Vietnam Memorial

Department of Commerce—Herber Hoover Bldg;  President from 1929-1933;  Secretary of Commerce, 1921-1928;

US Court House—E. Barrett Prettyman Bldg.  Prettyman was a US federal judge, appointed by President Truman to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1945 and served until 1971.

White House

I am in the process of making an offer on a house.  This involves a house inspection, or course.   And who is recommended for that task?  Someone named Nico DiStefano.  Nico DiStefano??  What kind of name is that? Clearly this is not West Michigan or Pella, IA!  My combined 28 years in those places taught me to pronounce and spell names like DeVries, Van Klompenberg, Zandstra, and van Dijk. In fact, in Pella, if you divided the phone book in half, S-Z would make up the second half due to the many Vs and Zs amongst the Dutch-American population. Not a Curry to be found anywhere.

I don’t know when I started to play the game of guessing family geographic origins based on family names.  Whenever it was, as a geographer this has evolved into interpreting individual’s place within the framework of the larger migration patterns in North America based on their names.

My sensitivity to names came early.  I grew up primarily in a town with Croatians who came to work in the factories and mines of central Illinois.  We knew the Petrovich sisters, and others with names like Tomlionovich, and Yerbic.  There were no Currys except us.

I went to college in Minnesota and had four David Johnsons in college with me. I had two roommates–an  Ostazeski and a Spence–they both married Johnsons.  And I knew a Carlson who married a Carlson.  And then there was Olof Olson.  I decided to take a Swedish language class and ended up being one of three out of a class of 30 who did not have a Swedish name. One had a Swedish mother and the other had had their name changed when they “got off the boat” from Sweden because their family was one of many, many Andersons onboard.  There were no Currys except me.

When I worked southern Louisiana I had to learn French names and spellings.  Boudreaux, Voisin, Billiot, Solet, and even Bourgeois, but no Currys there.

And now I am in Massachusetts where Irish, Italian, and English family names abound. But where do I find Curry except in the spice isle?

Half Brother of Ninth Great Grandfather

I have always looked for self understanding and identity in the landscapes and places out of which my family grew.  On a trip with my mother and grandmother in 1981, we went west from Minnesota, all the way to Oregon and Washington, visiting my mother’s cousins who had been scattered along the route during the depression.  My mother had not seen many of them since she was a child, yet we found echos of her father’s family in them–everything from their noses to musical ability and valuing education.  I didn’t “know” them yet we were invited to stay and I saw echoes of who I was, in who they were.

I have found myself helping my daughters see themselves through travel.When my older daughter was in grade school, she was struggling with issues related to her father’s family and her identity. My response was to take her on a trip to explore who she was.  We traveled from Iowa, where we lived, through Ames, Iowa where we looked for the brick with the name of my grandmother engraved on it in the Plaza of Heroines at the Catt Center at Iowa State University.  I had placed it there in honor of my grandmother who had come from Iowa and encouraged her daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters to be who they were.  We traveled on to southwest Minnesota, and met great aunts and uncles, visited cemeteries to see the names of my daughter’s great grandparents and great great grandparents.  We knocked on the door of the house where my father grew up and where my family lived with my grandmother for a year when I was 6 years old.  The present owner let us wander through the house as I recalled what it was like at the time I lived there.  I wanted my daughter to understand and know that she came from somewhere and had deep roots and connections to both place and family.

This same daughter went with me to Scotland for a conference many years later.  We learned about lowland Scots culture–the origins of public education, the egalitarian culture that encouraged the establishment of local organization of different kinds, and other values that went on to shape American culture.  These values and the culture resonated with my family which has Scottish roots.  This side of the family came to Pennsylvania  with very limited resources.  They moved west with opportunity and valued education.  When they settled on the prairies of Minnesota in the 1860s they quickly established a public school and a church for example. And of course, in Scotland we saw red hair and freckles, just like my younger daughter.

On a beautiful fall Saturday recently I went looking for myself in the New England landscape.  This took me to Chelmsford, the town where the English side of my family settled in the 1650s.  A local resident, who descended from a common ancestor, met me there to show me around (so we might have been something like 9th cousins, or first cousins, 9 times removed?).

The Old Burying Ground in Chelmsford, Mass, is at the center of the settled, which has a traditional New England form.  A common or “green” is at the center with a church on one side and usually a meeting house or local government building on another.

The Green

Public Building

The cemetery was full of my ancestors’ graves, but I struggled to find an echo of myself.   I heard about the power of established families.  And I saw last names that had been associated with a place for more than 350 years.  The descendents of these people were still here while my part of the family had moved west.  Probably my ancestors were relatively well educated and perhaps worked for the King.  They might have been in Jamestown or in the Caribbean before coming to Chelmsford.

It was interesting.  Maybe good material for a cocktail party.  But it didn’t resonate with my identity.  I come from an egalitarian, westward moving family.  My grandmother cleaned houses to make money.

Why did Scotland resonate with me but not Chelmsford?  They are equidistant in the past. Why do some traits and identities get passed on across time and space, but not others?  If I was a believer in the Turner Thesis I would say that is was the experience of westward movement and its associated challenges that made the difference, but that still doesn’t explain Scotland, but not Chelmsford.

In two weeks, my older daughter comes to visit.  We are going to visit Chelmsford.  I’m going to watch her reaction carefully.

Ninth Great Grandmother

I am used to pretty wild storms.  After all, I have lived in the Midwest most of my life where storms can be violent.

I woke up to windier conditions telling me that Sandy was coming.  I needed to get out and do a few things this morning but it wasn’t bad at all.  I decided to go look at the beach.  The waves were building.  In the harbor areas the boats had been pulled in and out of the water, leaving the area looking abandoned.

By the time I headed home after working in my office around noon, twigs and leaves were on the roads, but people were still out jogging.

Now, at 3 p.m., it is getting crazy.  The leaves are being blown off the trees and my windows are covered with water blown against it the wind whistles like the winds of a big winter storm.  And I just got the message that one of the dormitories at Gordon has to be evacuated due to high winds and risk of falling limbs.  Students are being moved to another dormitory.

There is a clash between the two weather systems over the state of Massachusetts.  Temperatures remain quite warm meaning lots of energy.  So though we aren’t near the middle of the hurricane, it is now 1500 miles across.  Gusts almost 70 miles.  And more to come. Another dorm has just been evacuated.   I think I get to add to my life list of natural events.

morning

Morning

Morning

Late morning–blowing trees

.

I am prepared.  I have found my flashlight and my candles.  I have been to the store and gotten food and filled up my gas tank.  I will fill up some pots and pans with water later today.  As I went down the road today, bags of leaves were along the road, being picked up by municipal trucks.  Instructions are to try to have your gutters cleaned out and limbs trimmed from your trees away from the power lines.  And don’t park your vehicles under trees.

And I have gone to the beach to experience the sea before the storm–all was calm.  But we are under a state of emergency.